Book Review: Izzy’s Becoming by Robert Pais

Near the start of Izzy’s Becoming, a twelve-year-old girl turns down the offer of a lifetime.

Izzy Ashford lives on Mirron, a planet identical to Earth in almost every respect except one: everybody’s eyes are gold, green, blue or grey, and where you sit in society is decided entirely by which. Gold is the top. Grey is the bottom. Izzy is grey, growing up in an all-gold town, and she has been offered the chance to change. Become Topaz. Match her parents, her classmates, her whole world. Nobody would think less of her for taking it. Her parents assumed she would.

She says no. And then, because saying no is not the same as fixing anything, she spends the next six years and 280 pages building an organisation to dismantle the system instead.

This is the second book in Robert Pais’s Izzy Chronicles, written for readers ten and up, and it is one of the more quietly ambitious middle-grade novels we have been sent.

The premise

The eye-colour conceit is doing a lot of work, and it does it well.

Any young reader will recognise what Pais is describing within about two pages, and that recognition is the point. A hierarchy based on something nobody chose, that everybody can see, that determines your schooling and your job and how strangers speak to you. By setting it on another planet, Pais gives a child room to think about it without immediately going defensive, which is exactly what allegory is for.

What makes it sharper than it needed to be is the offer. Izzy could simply leave. She is given a door out of the bottom of the hierarchy that almost nobody else on Mirron is given, and she has to decide whether to walk through it. When her father asks what decided it, her answer is the moral spine of the whole series:

“Growing up a Pearl in an all-Topaz community didn’t give me a good understanding of what life is really like for Sapphires and Pearls in most places on Mirron.”

She turns down the exit because taking it would mean never having to understand. That is a genuinely sophisticated idea to hand a twelve-year-old reader, and Pais hands it over without a speech attached.

What the book actually does

Here is where Izzy’s Becoming becomes unusual, and where we suspect it will find its readers.

Most children’s fiction about changing the world handles the changing part with a montage. Pais does not. He takes his young protagonists into the machinery and stays there. Izzy and her friends found The Prism Project at fourteen. They register it with the authorities. They lease office space and sign the lease. They recruit, they canvass door to door, they run kickoff meetings and take minutes and worry about money. They deal with a rival organisation, an infiltrator, a theft, a board of directors, and eventually a seat at a table where adults decide things.

There is a scene where Izzy knocks on her first door, terrified, and a woman named Carol Gordon invites four college students into her living room, listens, and hands over a cheque. It is a small scene. It is also, for a certain kind of thirteen-year-old reader, more useful than any number of chosen-one prophecies. This is what it looks like. You are nervous, you say your piece, and sometimes a stranger says yes.

For young readers who have ever felt furious about something and had no idea what a person is supposed to do about it, this book is a working answer. It is a civics education wearing a science fiction jacket, and it never talks down.

The people

The other thing Izzy’s Becoming gets right is warmth, and there is a lot of it.

Izzy’s parents are the best-drawn adults in the book. They are proud without being saccharine, and they worry out loud. Before her graduation speech, her mother does not tell her what to say. She tells her what is at stake:

“The color issue on Mirron is so sensitive and explosive right now that you need to think very carefully about what you say and how you say it.”

And then, when Izzy asks whether they trust her enough to let her deliver it unheard, they say yes. That small exchange tells you everything about that family.

There is a grandmother who takes her hands in the back of the car and says she is the luckiest grandma on the planet. There is a dog called Charley who gets talked to like a person and is the audience for every speech rehearsal. There are friendships that started in kindergarten and are still going. Erica and Michael, Izzy’s co-founders, are loyal and funny and get their own lives rather than orbiting hers.

The romance is handled with a light and appropriate touch. Two friends who work late over Chinese food and eventually work out what they have been circling. Nothing in it would trouble a parent of a ten-year-old, and it is written with real tenderness.

And it does not pretend

The thing that lifts this above a comfortable book about nice young people doing good is that Pais lets it cost something.

The Conflict on Mirron is escalating throughout. Violence increases. The authorities intervene more often. People are hurt and killed, offstage but acknowledged. And the final chapter does not flinch: a bomb at a reform organisation’s headquarters, Izzy in intensive care with shrapnel a inch from her carotid artery, and a friend who does not survive it.

The last line of the book is Izzy learning that Ed is dead and beginning to cry. For a middle-grade novel, that is a brave place to stop. It tells a young reader that this work is real, that people who do it are sometimes hurt for it, and that the story is not over. Which, given that Izzy’s Reckoning is coming, it is not.

A note for readers

Izzy’s Becoming is a procedural at heart, and that is a feature rather than a flaw once you know to expect it. A good deal of the book is meetings: kickoffs, board sessions, conferences, banquets. Pais is genuinely interested in how organisations run, and the writing is plain and unshowy in a way that suits a story about how things actually get done. Readers who arrive expecting chases will find something steadier and, we would argue, more useful.

One thread we hope Book Three picks up: The Prism Project adopts software that infers households’ political leanings from their television viewing, in order to decide which doors to knock on. In a novel this thoughtful about being sorted and judged by something you did not choose, there is a rich conversation waiting there, and Izzy is exactly the character to have it.

Verdict

Rating: ★★★★½

Izzy’s Becoming is a warm, sincere, genuinely useful book, and it is doing something we rarely see attempted for this age group.

Its premise is strong enough to start conversations at a dinner table. Its heroine is admirable without being perfect, and her defining choice is to give up an advantage rather than to acquire a power. Its families are loving, its friendships are durable, and its dog is very good. And underneath all of it sits an argument that young readers do not often get made to them so patiently: that changing the world is not a moment of heroism but years of paperwork, phone calls, doors, disappointments and meetings, undertaken by people who keep showing up.

Then it has the nerve to show what that can cost.

Hand this to a ten to fourteen year old who has started noticing that the world is not fair and does not yet know what a person is supposed to do about it. They will find a girl their age who did not know either, and worked it out anyway.

Book three cannot come soon enough.