She starts to dream and then she stops herself: SHAE.

Shae by Mesha Maren
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

This story is horrifyingly brutal yet wonderfully written, taking you directly to small town West Virginia. Sixteen-year-old Shae thinks she's found a new friend in Cam, who is a year her senior, when they meet at school. Soon she and Cam are hanging out, listening to music, and parking by the town lake. Suddenly Shae is pregnant, and everything she planned for her life changes. At the same time, Cam starts changing, wearing Shae's clothes and makeup. Shae's birth story goes terribly wrong, requiring an emergency C-section, and the doctors cut her bladder during the procedure. She's given opiates for the pain, and her whole world tilts.

The oxy blurs Shae's frayed edges, helping her cope with being a teenage mother and with the fact that Cam is transitioning. Shae can't confront reality or change, including Cam's transition. She's unable to talk to Cam, her mom, or anyone, really. As Cam transitions, she pulls away from Shae's small life: going to college, making friends, moving away. But Shae, she's stuck in her rural little life, running with the wrong crowd and increasingly hooked on drugs.

Maren illustrates how drug use and addiction can unravel a person's life. She does so starkly and in terrifying detail, introducing us to the cast of small town lowlifes who help keep Shae hooked on drugs and displaying how easy it is for them to find opiates--and eventually what lengths they'll go to keep their supply up. It's horrible that Shae's addiction stems from her teen pregnancy and subsequent botched C-section. She loves her daughter dearly, but she's not enough to get Shae away from the drugs. Neither is Cam.

Cam does not always come across as sympathetic, but she's the foil to Shae: she comes from a background of even greater poverty, with a harder road due to her transition. But Cam works hard to better herself, be authentic, and to give Eva the best care possible. Watching her grow and flourish while Shae regresses only makes the situation more depressing.

This book is difficult to read sometimes because it's so real and so sad. This is a powerful read about young motherhood and the hold addiction carries. 4.5 stars.

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