My Chemical Mountain

My Chemical Mountain

YA fiction
In my mind, Corina Vacco's My Chemical Mountain is a dystopia
whose time has come. Vacco was inspired to write it when she heard
teachers talking about a landfill much too close to a primary school.
She says that in real life tens of thousands of kids attend schools
that are close to and even on places that are dangerously polluted.
Should we be surprised? No. Should be do something about this? You
betcha! Reading the book is a very good start.
Jason and chums, Charlie and Cornpup, live in an enviroment that
seems like a ring of Hades from Dante's Divine Comedy. There are
scads of factories, running and shut down. The water in the creek
might have come from the caldrons of MacBeth's witches. Mutant
animals missing body parts or bearing tumors abound. All too many
people come down with cancer.
Jason has a personal reason to feel anger, a drive to expose the
evil doings that have destroyed his neighborhood. His dad had a fatal
accident at work. He had been trying to prove his company, Mareno
Chemical, was producing an illegal chemical substance. Company folks
say he was negligent with his safety precautions. Jason won't believe
that for a moment. He's also in a way lost his mom who has become an
obsessive eater, missing his eighth grade graduation to chow down on
Hamburger Helper.
There are also more everyday complications in Jason's life. His
pal, Charlie, is simultaneously friend and betrayer. A kid named
Kevin with a fondness for guns has said he's going to kill him. Girls
have gone from yucky to desirable. "....I liked my life a lot better
when girls were gross and dead frogs were beautiful. Now everything
is so complicated." Summer is passing much too quickly and the start
of high school looms ever everything.
My Chemical Mountain is a book that must be read and discussed.
Remember that, like all great dystopias, it is a distortion of
reality, not an out and out fabrication.
On a personal note, at our most recent Veazie Community School
Committee meeting we had a visit from nursing school students who
showed us there are alarming levels of trihalomethanes
(chronic exposure to which ups the risks of cancer and liver, kidney,
and CNS problems) in the school's drinking water. Each of my kids
spent nine years in that school. What the Hell?
A great big shout out goes out to all the brave folks who educate us
about these chemical plagues and spur us on to fight back.
Julia Emily Hathaway



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