Darkest Night, Brightest Star

Darkest Night, Brightest Star is a fantastic inclusion on the CBCA Notables list -- a really timely, pertinent and immediate book about Australian masculinity. Barry Jonsberg is an elder statesman of Australian YA writing, and he turns his former teacher's eye on the kind of boy I bet he saw a lot of in his classrooms. Morgan is thirteen, not interested in school, growing up with his dad and older brother after his mother left the family when he was just two. Morgan is not articulate; he keeps himself to himself, and not surprisingly, he's internalised a lot of not-great messages from the men in his family, who believe in never showing emotion (especially not vulnerability or fear), belittling women, and physical toughness as the measure of a man. But Morgan befriends Gray (who turns out to be gay); he'd rather look after plants than kick a ball on the soccer field; and his innate kindness comes to the fore when he starts helping out an old woman, Mary, who has a muddled idea that Morgan might be her own long-lost son.

Darkest Night, Brightest Star has a tight cast of characters. Sometimes the reader is able to draw connections that Morgan is a little slower to make. Morgan makes plenty of mistakes as he goes along, but he's lucky to have a handful of people in his life who really care about him, and at the end of the day, that's all any of us can ask for. The book doesn't wrap up everything in a tidy bow, but there is hope for Morgan (maybe not for his dad, who is not a great guy -- though Jonsberg drops us some hints about he became the damaged person that he is, and how he's passed on that legacy to his elder son). I hope boys read this book and perhaps see something of themselves in Morgan. I really liked it. The only element that Jonsberg hasn't tried to deal with here is the pernicious influence of the online 'manosphere' (I wish we had a better name for it), but maybe that's too big a topic to shoehorn into a short novel.