I briefly taught in public school. Teachers would often warn me that 6th and 7th graders were the worst. They had all the problems of the babies and all the problems of the big kids.
Indeed, to be thirteen is to be a contradiction. You’re not a child, but far from an adult. You feel everything too much, except when you don’t feel anything at all. You are completely and totally free, except that you aren’t at all.
Somehow simultaneously, both everything and nothing is important.
That brings us to Book Two of Connor Coyne’s Urbantasm. Fittingly paired with those adolescent contradictions, Coyne walks a tightrope of gritty realism and mythological storytelling. Our characters deal with union strikes, drugs, guns, dead factory towns and awkward romantic relationships; but there are also wise trees, shamanic sunglasses, and totemic shadows holding unknown spirits.
It’s a sprawling meditation on love and loss and sex and sexuality as told by our 7th grade narrator in the mid-nineties. It’s a story about a search for meaning, and a lot of that comes from our young protagonist as he struggles to understand what is meaningful. It’s a story of having strong feelings and being entirely embarrassed by those same feelings a week later.
To give it an elevator pitch, it’s a bit like if JRR Tolkien and Kevin Smith were tasked with adapting Euphoria with an even younger (yikes!) cast.