San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Little problems, and one big one Marisa Reichardt’s
‘Aftershocks’ follows a teenage girl with enough to worry about before a huge earthquake hits Southern California
Seventeen-year-old girls have a lot on their minds. There’s school, proms, parents, parties, gossip and the inordinate amount of general anxiety that comes with being a teenager in the 21st century. Still, preparing for a massive earthquake likely isn’t on the list of priorities, even for a teen living in Southern California. The idea of what to do if the “big one” strikes, much like climate change or, up until recently, surviving a global pandemic, is often too conceptual of a threat to really grasp at such a young age.
For Ruby, the central character in Marisa Reichardt’s “Aftershocks,” the “big one” could not have come at a more inopportune time. She’s just had a fight with her best friend, her relationship is on the rocks, and the novel opens with her skipping water polo practice because she just found out her mom is dating her coach. Suddenly, she’s trapped in a laundromat with a guy who, just moments before, she was attempting to persuade to buy her beer.
“We spend so much of our lives worrying about these little things, but of course, when you’re a teenager like Ruby, these are big things,” says Reichardt from her home in Los Angeles. “But they’re not big compared to a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. So I wanted to look at what it looks like when these smaller things that you’re allowing to take up all your headspace, and what that it looks like when something
much bigger can happen in an instant.”
“Aftershocks” is Reichardt’s second young adult novel. Having grown up in Scripps Ranch and Coronado, she says she’s always been compelled by the idea of a massive earthquake and how a young person would handle it.
“When you grow up in Southern California, the idea of the ‘big one’ is not a question of if, but a question of when,” says Reichardt, who is also a University of California San Diego graduate. “When you grow older, that question becomes more and more apparent. For our own self-care, we try not to think too hard about it.”
Reichardt says she’s been toying with an earthquake story for years, questioning whether to present it as a thriller or as something more nuanced. Luckily, she chose the latter, with the earthquake
itself happening almost immediately and Reichardt spending the rest of the novel exploring Ruby’s life up until this point. The uncertainty of the moment, not knowing whether Ruby will ever be rescued, gives the story weight and poignancy.
“We have this idea in our head that we’re going to be home with our family and that we’ll all survive together,” Reichardt says. “But my daughter isn’t always with me and my husband’s not always with me. So what does that look like when an earthquake happens and you’re all in different places? Not only that, but you can’t get ahold of one another and you don’t know where they are.
“That’s what was more intriguing to me: the idea that we all think we’re going to be with the people we care about, but the likelihood of that is actually slim.”
Reichardt says she was drawn to the young adult (YA) genre because she was always writing stories about teenagers, from the time she was that age to when she was in graduate school.
“It’s not something I ever consciously said, ‘I’m going to write young adult.’ It was more like, ‘I only write young adult, so how can I make this work?’ ” says Reichardt. She does have a fortunate resource, she says: She is currently living with a teenage daughter. “I think teenage readers are so smart and engaged, and they will see through what is fake. They will call you out on it. The best thing I can do is to try to be authentic and truthful.”
Like most excellent writers within the YA genre, Reichardt also finds a way to make that intensity compelling to adults. A hallmark of good YA novels (think Rainbow Rowell’s “Eleanor and Park” or John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars”) is that even when an adult is reading something that’s clearly intended for a younger audience, older readers are still able to easily recall those impassioned realizations that come with youth.
“There’s something about that time in your life where everything is so much more intense because so much of it is happening for the first time,” says Reichardt, who has another book coming out next year about a young girl who comes from an anti-vaccination household. “There’s an intensity that comes with that time that I’ve always been drawn to.”