In the Study With the Wrench: Representation in YA Fiction

Sometimes–very occasionally–a book manages to be important without doing the kinds of things we tend to think render a book important (in the bullshit, Canon-gatekeeping ways that we discuss importance, at any rate).

Diana Peterfreund’s In the Study with the Wrench is one such book.

Of course, as a reader, I’m primed to love this novel. It’s a continuation of In the Hall with the Knife, which I enjoyed, so it’s got that delicious Big Sequel Energy. It’s set in the complex, transmedial universe of Clue (the board game) and makes delightful easter-egg references to Clue: The Movie, a film from which I can recite nearly every line. (“It’s you!” practically opens the novel.) It’s set in a privileged-yet-somewhat-decaying private school in the wintry Northeast, a setting that, despite fully knowing better, manages to suck me in every time. And it’s also just a rollicking good mystery, full of suspicious behavior and red herrings (“Communism is just a red herring”) and all the generic tropes that feel like a comfort, even when deployed in the service of murder fiction.

There’s a lot going for this novel, too, apart from my own personal readerly predilections. Like in its predecessor, Peterfreund does clever and inventive things within a preformatted structure, so even if we know we are getting a Plum, Scarlet, Mustard, Peacock, and Green, it never feels rote. She deftly builds upon the groundwork she laid in the first of the series, and in this installment she offers some thoughtful and complex character building. The students of the Murder Crew are–whether they like it or not–bound by the trauma of Boddy’s death in book one, and here we see them rankle against that bond even as they eventually acknowledge and submit to it. We also get real character growth–they all learned something from the mistakes they made, and even though growth can be difficult, they’re all a little more likeable in this novel as a result of that growth. It feels earned.

So yes–there is a lot here to like. The ensemble cast works really well here, and the new additions (Perry Winkle, for god’s sake) are fun introductions into the narrative. There are nice undercurrents of acknowledging privilege and racial difference that never feel tokenistic. We also get to see these students trying to rebuild themselves and their worlds, which is undergirded by the (sometimes haphazard) efforts to rebuild Blackbrook itself after the devastation of the storm in book one. It’s an elegant parallel.

What this book does, though–what makes it feel important in a way we might not generally ascribe to a middle installment of a series based on a board game–is the way that it handles the relationship between Finn and Mustard. The groundwork was smartly laid in book one, so it doesn’t come as any surprise here to see them gravitate toward one another. But what Peterfreund manages to do is build a queer relationship in a way that we don’t often see, either in YA or in larger literature.

YA has a tendency to be very matter-of-fact about queerness. The characters are here, and they’re queer, and though they may face discrimination, there’s a surety to it, to their conviction, to their identity. This is an observation, not a complaint–I’m a fan, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow up with this kind of shining representation as ubiquitous, but I’m immensely glad it’s out there. However, what is happening in this novel is different in a way that feels significant. As Finn and Mustard draw closer to one another, we are afforded the interiority of both of them, so we get to see both Finn’s discovery that he is indeed attracted to Mustard and Mustard’s own complicated experience of his internalized homophobia. We witness their identities unfurling; we are working it out alongside them, and I don’t see that very often. It’s refreshing, and real.

It’s also all done in a lovely, nuanced manner that doesn’t reduce or simplify either character to one note. Finn–the pragmatic scientist–rolls with his newfound awareness of his own bisexuality, and he readily fits this new information into his concept of self. Mustard, by contrast, has been struggling underneath his shame about his sexuality, a shame further reified by his father’s disgust–a shame, by the way, that Peterfreund absolutely conveys to the reader even though she never explicitly has Mustard stop the narrative to explain himself. It’s a great example of the old adage show, don’t tell.

Taken together, these two characters’ very different acknowledgements of their attractions and the very different ways they process the discovery of it being mutual feels incredibly tender, and kind, and real. We ache for Maestor, for the fear he lives in, and we want him to find his way out of it.

I think what makes this work so well–what makes it feel natural, why it feels important–is that when set into the midst of an ensemble cast, in a novel where each character’s perspective is depicted, there’s nothing special about their attraction to one another. It’s lovely, yes, and written sympathetically, but in everyone’s eyes except Mustard’s, it’s no different than Orchid’s romance with Vaughn.

I’m not condemning the Out and Proud stories, or the centrally-positioned queer stories, or the narratives of coming out. I genuinely love those stories, too. There’s value in the confrontation of that, in the unapologetic surety of it.

But when a queer romance is normal… when it’s just one of many plot threads… when it’s as natural as the het romance… when nobody casts aspersions on it (other than the gay kid suffering from his own internalized homophobia)… when it’s not a plot device, but is instead just character building…

That.

That feels important.