Behold the phenomenon of the 90s teen thriller. Forget about forensics and just go with it.
Title: Wanted!
Author: Caroline B. Cooney (1947-)
Original Publication Date: 1997
Edition: Scholastic Inc (1997), 230 pages
Genre: Thriller.
Ages: 11-14
First Sentence: “It’s Daddy, Alice.”
Alice gets a call from her father telling her to take one of his computer discs and its backup and drive his red Corvette to an ice cream place outside of town, hanging up before she can ask him whatever for. Alice doesn’t have her license yet, and before she can work up the nerve to leave the house a stranger with a voice she almost recognises comes looking for the disc. Alice hides beneath the Corvette until he’s gone. After the combined terror of this incident and of having to drive an overpowered muscle car to the rendezvous point, Alice waits for her father to arrive. He doesn’t. Instead, she hears on the radio that he has been found murdered in his house and that Alice sent an email to her mother confessing to the crime. Now in full panic mode, and thinking her own mother is against her, Alice goes on the run.
Wanted! is a beach read, a lightweight thriller dedicated to answering only one question: what would it be like to be a teenage girl on the run from the cops? Follow Alice from A to B to C as she attempts to do just that.
The book opens on dialogue, proceeds through a “hide from the creepy guy” scene and settles into a surprisingly accurate portrayal of a girl in shock. Alice takes off in an overpowered car without even adjusting the seat first, without calling the cops, because her father told her to meet her at the ice cream place and that’s all she can think to do. She responds like a scared child and the only thing unbelievable about this scenario is that it takes forever for a cop to notice her driving that badly in that car:
There was the turnoff, by a low-lying meadow with a narrow glimpse of the beautiful Salmon River. The turn came quicker than Alice expected, and she took her foot off the gas late, braked late, and knew immediately that the best decision was to quit making the turn. Skip the whole thing, keep going straight, turn around later and come back. Too late for that. Alice found herself in the turn with way too much velocity. The tires screamed as if she had run over squirrels and Alice screamed, too, imagining their flat, bloody bodies, but she hung onto the wheel and missed the picket fence of somebody’s yard and even got back onto her side of the road.
Maybe the lack of cell phones prolonged the plot.
Provided you can get behind a protagonist who is running scared, lying and hiding with two days of practice while in constant panic mode, Alice is fairly easy to sympathize with – which is good, considering she occupies about 98% of the book by herself. Cooney manages this through extensive focus on Alice’s state of mind, her repetitive fears and random thoughts offering some sense of what her normal life was like as she figures out how to disappear. She ditches the flashy Corvette, she evades mall security, pretends to be a college student and wonders what to do as technology keeps getting in her way. Alice is running around with a disc that may have gotten her father killed and she can’t read what’s on it because every school and library computer lab requires passwords and ID cards.
Sadly for any readers attracted to the paranoia of the premise – girl on the run! trust no one! – this really isn’t Robert Ludlum for teens, more of a standard “spot the killer” narrative with a cast that’s slightly too small for good red herrings. Because of the focus on two day’s worth of action, there’s less tapestry for the mystery to be pinned against. Alice uncovers old secrets but it takes her way too long to figure out who the only incriminating figure truly is. On the other hand, it’s more excusable for her than it is for the police, who apparently don’t know how to talk down a scared fugitive girl. Also, forensic evidence would have put Alice in the clear so quickly that there would have been no story at all if she’d only understood that a “typed confession” meant diddly squat by comparison.
But Wanted! is geared for a younger audience and it’s clear that Cooney didn’t win their support with cold hard logic. Underneath the thrills, Alice’s actions are actually driven by a very simple emotional hook – her love for her parents and her sense of betrayal at their divorce. Alice flees because the divorce left a gap in Mom’s character which allows her to fear the worst – that her own mother will not believe her innocence. Does that make any sense logically? Nope, but any girl whose parents ever let her down this way will get it. There’s no 21st Century Henkesian resignation here – Cooney taps this vein of teen angst for all its worth:
Alice was pretty close friends with Cindy, who had been through divorce twice with each parent, a horror so enormous that Alice could not even think of it as real life, but as a soap opera taking over.
…
How could Mom stand the presence of any man but Dad? Couldn’t Mom see that these men did not measure up? How could Mom giggle and put on perfume and buy a new wardrobe and experiment with expensive makeup as if she, too, were fifteen and learning how to flirt?
Similar to Betsy Byars (with some obvious literary differences), Cooney understands that a character doesn’t need to be in on the action to have an affect on the protagonist. It’s a little unexpected to find such primal resentment threaded within this one-day escapist beach read, but it works to give Wanted! a little emotional backbone (and prolong the plot).
One thing which is very obvious about Wanted! is that it will only appeal to younger and less jaded teens. This is not a criticism, although today it will be seen as one because YA has been aging up for a while. A quick scan of the recent YA Edgar Award list makes it clear that the industry has been busy taking advantage of “crossover appeal” with the adult market (which already made up at least 55% of YA readers back in 2012). The 2019 Edgar winner was a novel called Sadie, which comes replete with trigger warnings for pedophilia/sexual abuse and is about a teenage girl hunting down the man who killed her little sister. All of the (adult) reviewers love it, and applaud its maturity (because YA needs to “grow”). The marketplace has changed vastly since Cooney’s heyday and I expect the “dark sophistication” of YA books to only increase while (by coincidence, I’m sure) teen readership continues its decline.
Is there any audience for Wanted! left? Like most potboilers, it has an obvious expiration date and that has long since passed. Of course, some kids do enjoy reading vintage books, whether for the novelty factor or from content sensitivity, and if my prediction pans out I expect we will be seeing a revival of vintage YA at some point. Cooney’s Face on the Milk Carton series has remained in print, so it’s clearly possible. I suspect that Wanted! is not the best that she has to offer, but it’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
Parental Guide.
Violence: Nothing visceral. The plot hinges on a pair of murders (Alice’s Dad and another person long ago), but neither incident is witnessed by Alice and little description is ever offered. The killer puts Alice in vaguely specified danger.
Values: Spoilers if you actually plan to read this.
Everything is tied up with a bow at the end. Alice was never without a safety net after all. If she had only trusted her mother, her school friends or the cops, she would have been safe from the very start.
Also, don’t run from the police.
End of Spoilers.
Role Models: Alice has many scruples about her newfound career as a fugitive. She burns with shame when she has to steal a little kid’s backpack. She ditches the Corvette but can’t bring herself to steal another car and flee – because then she’d have truly broken the law. In the end, she goes to a friend of her Dad’s, and since he’s away, she steals his old beater – little is made of this act afterward, perhaps because she knows who to return it to and figures he might forgive her given the circumstances.
Educational Properties: … … What exactly do you expect me to say here?
End of Guide.
Cooney wrote a wide array of novels, including a retelling of Macbeth, a retelling of the Trojan War, a reimagining of The Snow Queen as a paranormal horror story, a romantic time travel quartet, a non-romantic vampire trilogy, and a thriller that got “banned” in school libraries for its anti-Islamic content. I might continue to sample her work when I’ve got an afternoon to kill. It sounds quite eclectic.
Up Next: Late period Marguerite Henry.
Title: Tom Sawyer, Detective
The Western Corner of the Castle 