infernoInferno, by Robin Stevenson • Orca Publishing

Readers of this blog (if I do decide to make my Reading Log posts public instead of just saving them for my professor), have probably already guessed that I’m a little obsessed with Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’ve got more translations than anyone should reasonably own, I turn to the Inferno for comfort and guidance when I’m feeling gloomy. Heck, I even did my undergraduate thesis on Dante. So when I learned that a book called Inferno, starring a female protagonist named Dante, had won was a finalist for the BC Library Association’s Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize? I had to check it out.

And Dante (or Emily, as her mother and teachers insist on calling her, despite her name change) is a girl after my own heart. Frustrated with life in the suburbs, feeling trapped in school and missing her best friend/girl friend, who has moved away and is ignoring her Facebook missives, she turns to Dante’s Inferno for solace. It’s not that she’s blindly raging (though she does rage to her maddeningly unsympathetic English teacher that “this place is hell”). Rather, she sees Dante’s hell as a story that calls for responsibility, for self awareness, and for a justice that transcends the desire for revenge or comeuppance. In short, it’s a healthy, helpful book for a high school girl to be reading.

One of the themes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is that no one is saved — no one makes it through life, or to the better parts of the afterlife, alone. Without Virgil, Dante would have never been able to make it out of his dark wood. Without Beatrice, he would be unable to gaze upon the perfect spheres of heaven. And when Stevenson’s teen Dante meets a girl named Parker, who appears first handing out anarchist literature at her school and later at a support group for teen girls, she begins a journey as well, one she could never — or perhaps would never — have taken on her own.

This was a great read, well paced and well written, with compelling characters and situations that, while extraordinary, never seemed unbelievable. Stevenson captures the high emotions of high school, alongside strong, believable relationships and a protagonist who acts rashly at times, but always maintains a strong inner core I’d be proud to emulate now, never mind when I was a teenager! I’d recommend it to high schoolers and adults.