Friday, January 31, 2020

Homeless in High School

Roam by C.H. Armstrong


Nothing breeds angst like being a teenager in a new school. 

Being new in school partway through your senior year is bad enough, but Roam's protagonist Abby Lunde has been ripped from a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle with two working parents, and a highly successful high-school life—cheerleader, member of a clique of "populars"—to land in Minnesota, in winter, her family homeless in an otherwise-wealthy community.

To add further apprehension to her social situation, Abby was badly traumatized by the way her "friends back home" reacted to her change in circumstance, and lives in fear of the day her new schoolmates will learn she is sleeping in a car with her family in the local Walmart parking lot, pretending to shop there when she needs to use the toilet, eating at the local soup kitchen, and doing her morning ablutions in the high-school restroom.

Nevertheless, she does gain friends almost immediately, from a ready-made group of Disney-nicknamed classmates to an interested young man who turns into a potential prom date. This rich-boy/poor-girl trope is a major part of the tale—along with a snobbish bully antagonist, a pre-prom "makeover," and a vocal competition straight out of High School Musical

So is this just a soap-opera teen drama with a homeless twist? Not at all.

The strongest message here is the crucial importance of family in overcoming teen angst. From her perspective, Abby's family was broken by the unforgivable choices made by her parents. In her new school, and in the homeless support community they came to Minnesota to find, she builds a wider family, and eventually learns to heal what is broken in her own heart.

And nothing could be less soap-opera than that.

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