Standing on Neptune

It’s been over a half century since the appearance of Ann Head’s Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones, a title about teen pregnancy and one of the books credited with launching new realism in young adult literature. Teen pregnancy, a theme that continues to resonate with an adolescent audience, is the subject matter of Sherrard’s free verse novel Standing on Neptune. The story begins on a Monday when 17-year-old Brooke Morgan Wells realizes her period’s five days late. Because she and her boyfriend Ryan, also 17, had had sex once, their first time, during the preceding month, there’s the possibility that Brooke could be pregnant. The book’s open-ending occurs six days later on Saturday when Brooke purchases a pregnancy test.

Following a brief “introduction” in which Brooke addresses her readers and sets up the book, the rest of the story is sequentially structured around the six days of this week in Brooke’s life. Though Brooke is the book’s main narrator, Sherrard also gives Ryan voice through three numbered prose sections each titled “Ryan Speaks”, with these being inserted on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I don’t know if Sherrard has read You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by linguist Deborah Tannen. Tannen posited that males and females use language differently, with males using language to problem solve and assert authority while females use it to build relationships.

Whether Sherrard has read Tannen’s book or not, these communication differences clearly come through in the “Ryan Speaks”. While Brooke is trying to “bond” with Ryan in their shared situation, he does not comprehend what her intent is, and, instead, offers simple solutions, including denial in the form of wishful “false alarm” thinking. For example, on Wednesday, in response to Ryan’s repeated text requests to meet face-to-face to talk, Brooke responds, Meet me at our tree in an hour. The next entry is a shape poem titled “...our tree...” in which Brooke tells her readers that this location was where “he gathered courage to say the three words that made it real.” Immediately following, “Ryan Speaks: Two” provides Ryan’s version of what occurred at their meeting, and, though Ryan recalls that this “was the first place I told her I loved her”, he just doesn’t understand the symbolic emotional importance the location holds for Brooke, saying instead, “I wasn’t sure of what the point of it was. Going there today I mean.” Sherrard does not make Ryan into a villain. Sadly, he’s just a boy who, when confronted with a fight or flight scenario, has chosen the latter.

The book’s title is an unusual one and comes from a science class astronomy assignment in which Brooke drew the slip labeled “Neptune”. Though Brooke’s working on the assignment provides her with moments of respite from thinking about the consequences of her late period, she also finds the planet Neptune to be metaphor for the enormous isolation she feels, something she expresses on Thursday in another shape poem, “...standing on Neptune...”.

While the story principally focuses on Brooke and Ryan’s now challenged relationship, bits and pieces scattered throughout the book yield a picture of Brooke’s family. She lives with her mother, her parents having divorced when she was 12, and both parents have since remarried. Brooke spends every second weekend with her father, and it is this Saturday that she is with him. She also has a nine-year-old brother Kevin, and Jerry, her stepfather, has Mel, a 12-year-old daughter who appears to live with her mother. Like most girls her age, Brooke has a best friend, and Brooke would desperately like to share what’s happening with her; however, Emma had previously shown herself unable to keep a secret, and so Brooke must hold the words that are “ready to leap off my tongue.”

Many readers do not like books that end without providing all the answers to the questions that the author has posed. However, in Standing on Neptune, the test results are really not important as readers will realize that Brooke has come to recognize how to move forward.