“I came out of the womb sprouting cynicism and wishing for rain.” A review of Alice Oseman’s debut novel Solitaire
Trigger Warnings:
This review is going to discuss the novel Solitaire by the author Alice Oseman. Due to the content of the novel as a whole delving into some seriously deep and troubling territory, I am going to include a trigger warning here for the discussion of sexual assault, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and eating disorders, as well as self harm and relapse, suicidal thoughts and their ideation.
Beyond this, your average review spoiler warnings are hereby in effect.
First a quick overview, taken from my Goodreads review of this book;
This book follows a protagonist battling diagnosed depression with self-deprecating jokes and learning to find joy in the world. An eccentric speed skater who likes solving mysteries but doesn’t have any friends. Two very different teens finding hope in a new friendship. And an online group of pranksters.
Solitaire is a book focused on Tori Spring, and her time in school, her mental health, and her friendships. Just because someone smiles doesn’t mean that they’re happy.
This isn’t a book about happy people. It’s written for people who don’t feel understood, people who feel deeply sad, and introverted. It’s the absolute truth, in the way that those people will see it, even if it sounds false to everyone else.
It’s the story of sad, introverted, pessimist Victoria (Tori) Spring. Nothing about being sad, introverted or pessimistic is wrong. That’s just the way she is. And yet people judge her for being like this. They say she doesn’t try enough to make friends, or to care about anything, and maybe it’s true, it probably is, but they’re not her. They don’t understand what’s going on inside her head. They don’t know how much she actually cares about her brother Charlie, the best person in the entire world, or how the things that happened to him broke her because he’s her little brother and nothing bad should happen to him. They don’t know that she’s sad 95% of the time but can do nothing about it because this isn’t just her deciding to be sad, this is her experiencing her life. Tori Spring was born in a world in which you should smile all the time and answer ‘I’m fine’ to every ‘How are you?’ Tori Spring was born into an extrovert and fake happy world, but why should she bend to the world’s will and be like that as well? This isn’t her.
Ultimately this is a book about family and friendship. The family dynamic between the Spring siblings is one of the best I’ve read about. They’re a bunch of precious human beings who deserve good things to happen to them. They’re trying to make their way through this world the best way they can, sometimes they fail, but they have each other to help them get up when they fall.
This book isn’t perfect, but it was perfectly real, and I needed it.
There’s a few specific scenes I want to talk about in more depth than I did above, because I really feel that they give the reader a better insight into the character’s personalities and motivations.
The first of these is when Tori initially meets Michael Holden, because here you see her begin to analyse and look back on her past decisions, finding something that is worthwhile pursuing. This thread follows through the story and the growing relationship between these two characters. You see Michael turn up at the restaurant Tori is at with her friendship group, (which she refers to as ‘Our Lot’) and he pretends to not remember why he came looking for her, which subtly plants the seed for the reader that perhaps he just wants to spend time with her and enjoys her company.
The next scene and idea I want to pick out is her relationship with Lucas Ryan; how this relationship transitioned from them being childhood best friends, how they drifted apart going into secondary school, and how that had quite an obvious effect on him. This leads to the revelation that Lucas has had feelings for Tori, with those silent feelings being the catalyst for him starting Solitaire, in an attempt to get Tori’s attention and get her to actually notice him. Lucas only tells Tori how he’s felt and that he started Solitaire because he was forced to, because he as a character is to some extent seen as a typical male, but in a more sensitive way. He pushes his feelings down and doesn’t express them because if he told her how he felt at the time, he risked being emotionally hurt.
Something that appears to be a strong motivation for Tori’s decisions in this narrative is her family, and in particular her brother Charlie. It’s mentioned that Charlie has OCD, and one of the compulsions he has surrounds food, which caused him to develop anorexia. In Alice’s other books they cover that part of the story and Charlie’s journey with his mental health, however it’s something that affects his whole family to a greater or lesser degree. Tori is described as one of few people who is good at doing the middle ground, checking in with him, but without crowding him. One night when she goes out with Michael, Charlie has an argument with his boyfriend, and their younger brother Oliver calls Tori asking her to come home because something has happened.
She comes home to find Charlie in the kitchen, with a cold plate of lasagna on the table, untouched, and every food item in the kitchen on the floor, in piles sorted by colour and size. In her mind, Charlie has had a relapse because she dropped the ball and wasn’t home to stop it from happening. She starts doing the usual things that people often do when they blame themself for an event that was out of their control, namely controlling the things that they are able to, something that manifests itself differently for everyone. And she realises “[she] can’t possibly let my parents have two children who knowingly starve themselves.” That particular quote felt really poignant to me because it feels as though she is realising that some of her self-destructive habits, like not eating, and not sleeping, could turn into much bigger problems quite easily, and she doesn’t want that to happen, she doesn’t want to put her family through that.
The penultimate scene I want to discuss is Tori going to a concert by The Clay, which ultimately gets sabotaged by Solitaire, a situation which becomes dangerous really quickly and easily. This group who were supposedly doing harmless pranks, quickly became the group who get everyone at a party to start attacking Ben Hope, simply to advance their interests (using his sexual assault as a prop more than anything else, whether or not this justice was earned)*. This group who were supposedly harmless decided to set off fireworks in a large crowd, injuring a lot of people, Tori included, in an attempt to get her to notice Lucas. This harmless group very quickly became not harmless at all but very much violent and volatile. For me this shows the lengths that these characters are willing to go to for them to be noticed, and it demonstrates well how dangerous things can be when they go ignored for so long.
The final scene I want to look at in more depth is the end of Solitaire as a group. The fire, whether it was intended to be or not, symbolises the end of the old lives of everyone involved. The fire changed them all, or rather, it exposed another side to them that wasn’t evident before that point, it marked a point of no return. Tori realises that her and Becky Allen really weren’t well suited anymore, especially after her continuing to support Charlie’s assaulter. It symbolises the end of a period of change. Tori has changed as a person, become more open and willing to engage with people, have more open communication with other people, and make friends (or at least be friends with Michael). But she also realised that her coping mechanisms weren’t healthy, looking after everyone but herself was just a way to avoid dealing with her own failing mental health. Her dark humour was just used as a deflection for how she was really feeling, something to get other people to laugh and to focus on the humour instead of the feelings she showed. She realised that “just because someone smiles doesn’t mean they’re happy”. She showed Michael her true feelings and didn’t let herself hide them behind humour or deflection. She showed him that she really does feel unworthy and pessimistic, that she was going to kill herself, that she probably would have had he not turned up when he did. And they finally spoke their truths, absolute truths, and told each other how they felt, they were there for each other, the way that Tori and Charlie are there for each other.
To conclude, the theme I was following was how Tori changes as a person, but how her motivations don’t change through the novel. She becomes more open, less introverted and she finds some happiness in new friendships. But she still cares deeply for her brother, and she’s still suffering, she still has mental health issues. Some people bring out the best in you, for Tori that was Michael. He brought out the joy and the love for life and an appreciation of the small things. Other people bring out the worst traits, this is demonstrated by the actions carried out by Lucas in search of recognition and love from Tori, as well as with Becky, how they used to be good friends and slowly over time they drifted apart, became so different that they didn’t know how to actually speak to each other anymore. As the cover says, this is not a love story, rather Solitaire, at its core, is a story of relationships, imperfections, and, ultimately, personal growth.
Furthermore the matter of Ben Hope being assaulted is one of deep moral contention among readers; on one hand it’s the classic ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’, on the other there’s the matter of justice for Charlie, and then that leads onto the matter of whether justice should be carried out like this, should justice be punitive or reconstructive and so on. The fact that this act could also be seen as being entirely done for the attention of Tori with Charlie as an afterthought also comes into play, muddying the waters somewhat. We’re still trying to piece together our own feelings about all this, so we don’t blame anyone for having different feelings about the matter.