Adolescence, Secrets, and Lies... Oh My!

**some spoilers

Many of the people reading this response are adolescents. Most likely, all of them have lied or kept secrets from their family before. Adolescence, is a time where teens make mistakes and mature from them. Lying and keeping secrets from the people who care about you are mistakes you learn from in adolescence. Staying on the topic of adolescence, about a month ago my class read an article by Megan Cox Gurdon titled “Darkness Too Visible”; in which she claims that most young adult novels do not possess an uplifting or meaningful message that a young readers can learn from. The book I recently completed titled, The Evolution of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin, is an intriguing young adult novel, and the second book in The Mara Dyer Trilogy. The main character, Mara Dyer, survives a life threatening experience. She is told she is the only person who survived. After the life threatening experience, Mara starts seeing things that can’t possibly be there. Everyone thinks she is insane, so Mara begins to lie to the ones she loves. If you read closely you can learn a lesson from The Evolution of Mara Dyer. Michelle Hodkin would like for young readers to learn from Mara’s mistakes. Mara’s keeping of secrets and lying to the ones that she loves, made her situation worse.

Towards the middle of the book, Michelle Hodkin puts Mara in a tough situation. Where the reader questions whether Mara will tell the truth and get put in a mental institution? Or will she stick with the lie that she told and making a bigger hole in her heart. Mara decides to keep lying to her family and hold her secret. As Mara’s visions get worse, the lie inevitably gets bigger. Mara is not only lying to her own family, but to her psychologist and her friends. At this point in the story, the experienced reader should be able to recognize that telling lies and keeping secrets from the ones that you love, hurts you more than it hurts them. This is what happened to Mara. The truth got harder and harder to keep in. Especially since Mara told such an overwhelming lie and in addition, is holding an egregious secret. I won’t spoil the entire book for you, but the situation gets worse and things don’t go the way Mara plans.    

By the end of the novel, an experienced and mature reader should be able to connect Mara’s decisions to her  worsening situation. If you couldn’t make the connection that Mara’s situation got worse, than you might have went on to make the same mistakes that Mara did. Megan Cox Gurdon (the author of “Darkness Too Visible”) thinks that readers will lie and keep secrets from their loved ones as well because of the example that Mara set in the book. Most immature readers would make that conclusion. Nevertheless, if you read The Evolution of Mara Dyer with experience, an adolescent reader could draw the conclusion that you shouldn’t lie to your loved ones. Instead of making the same decisions as Mara and learning from your mistakes,  you can skip a risky step and learn from her’s.  

To draw this response to a close, a young reader can learn many lessons from Mara’s mistakes. Two of the most important lessons, that an adolescent reader can learn from  The Evolution of Mara Dyer is to not tell your loved ones untruths and/or not to keep life threatening secrets from them. Mara situation got worse because she lied to her loved ones and kept an egregious secret from them. Once you tell a lie, it inevitably gets bigger and the longer you keep a secret, the harder it is to keep. In Megan Cox Gurdon’s mind, she sees young and inexperienced readers that will follow in Mara’s footsteps, instead of learning from her mistakes. Experienced readers can learn more than the two important lessons for adolescence from Mara’s mistakes. If you were to read  The Evolution of Mara Dyer (which I greatly recommend!) before you read this response, would you have learned from Mara’s  mistakes or made the same ones?