Book Review: Izzy’s Dilemma by Robert Pais

There is a particular kind of children’s book that arrives with a single idea so clean it seems obvious in retrospect, and then spends its length proving that the idea was harder to execute than it looked. Robert Pais’s Izzy’s Dilemma is one of these. Its premise can be stated in a sentence, and that sentence will hold a ten-year-old’s attention for the length of a novel.

On the planet Mirron – Earth’s twin, some 150,000 light-years away on the far side of the galaxy – people are physically identical to one another in every respect but one. There is no variation in skin, hair, or build. There is only eye color, and it decides everything. Gold-eyed Topaz occupy the top of the social order, followed by the green-eyed Emerald, the blue-eyed Sapphire, and finally the grey-eyed Pearl.

Topaz are seated first in restaurants regardless of who arrived before them, given the best seats at any venue regardless of what anyone else paid, and admitted to the finest universities ahead of better-qualified applicants of lower rank. Everyone on Mirron understands the arrangement to be arbitrary. It has survived all of recorded history nonetheless.

Pais’s decision to build his hierarchy out of eye color rather than any other trait is the first sign that he knows exactly what he is doing. The choice inevitably summons Jane Elliott’s famous 1968 classroom exercise, in which an Iowa schoolteacher divided her third graders by iris color and watched a caste system form within a day. Elliott’s lesson worked because eye color is visible, immutable, and manifestly meaningless – the same three properties that make Mirron legible to a child in about four paragraphs. Young readers can hold the entire system in their heads and then, crucially, do their own reasoning inside it.

Into this world Pais places Isabelle “Izzy” Ashford, a twelve-year-old Pearl adopted as an infant by Tom and Judy Ashford, a wealthy Topaz couple in Covington, a community that is ninety-five percent Topaz and, as her father eventually concedes, carries a reputation for snobbery.

When a Topaz classmate’s needling hardens into open cruelty – wrong school, Pearl – Izzy can no longer treat the color system as background noise. Then, on a beach during the family’s summer vacation, a diminutive stranger with unnaturally bright Topaz eyes introduces himself as Sam, a member of something called the Lightkeepers Council, and offers to make her Topaz. Permanently. Irreversibly. She has until the seventh of September, the day before seventh grade begins, to decide.

The offer lands in the fourth chapter, which means the deadline hangs over everything that follows – an entire summer at River Valley, a diverse day camp where Izzy encounters children of all four colors together for the first time in her life. It is a well-judged piece of architecture. The clock does the work of suspense while Pais gets on with the business of changing his heroine’s mind about what she wants.

The novel’s most intelligent structural decision, though, is the adoption itself. By placing a Pearl child inside a wealthy Topaz household, Pais isolates the variable with something close to laboratory precision. Izzy has money, a large house, an excellent school, devoted parents, and a beloved dog.

The single disadvantage she carries is her color. Everything else has been controlled for. This transforms Sam’s offer from a temptation into a genuine philosophical problem: Izzy is not being asked whether she would like to escape hardship, but whether a label alone is worth the self attached to it. Very few books for this age group set their central question up so cleanly, and fewer still trust their readers to sit inside it for two hundred pages without being handed the answer.

Pais also declines several easy shapes his material offers him. His antagonists are people rather than devices. Billy Winthrop, the classmate whose cruelty sets the plot in motion, turns out to be a boy whose parents have spent eighteen months in a collapsing marriage and who has recently begun anger management therapy; his mother’s admission of this, delivered with visible shame in the back room of an ice cream parlor, is one of the book’s strongest scenes precisely because it refuses to let anyone off the hook while insisting that the bully is a child too.

Sharper still is a turn at camp, where Izzy is quietly frozen out by two Emerald girls. When one of them finally apologizes, her explanation carries real moral weight: they had themselves been treated badly by Topaz, and had imagined that treating a Pearl the same way might make them feel better about it. That hierarchies reproduce themselves downward, and that their victims often become their most reliable enforcers, is a sophisticated observation, and Pais delivers it in a child’s voice without a syllable of authorial underlining.

The finest piece of construction is quieter than any of this. Early in the book, Judy teaches her daughter a technique for managing distress – when a thought hurts, change the thought – and reduces it to a single spoken word between them, a private code. Many chapters later we learn that Judy did not invent it. It came from Frankie Jenkins, her Pearl college roommate and closest friend, who devised it at fourteen to survive her father’s abandonment, and who is revealed to be Izzy’s birth mother. Frankie carried Izzy to term knowing she had better than even odds of not surviving the delivery, and asked Judy to raise the child if she did not. A habit of mind survives in a daughter who never knew where she got it, passed hand to hand across a death she has no memory of. It is a beautiful piece of plotting, seeded twenty chapters early and paid off without fuss, and it is the emotional summit of the novel.

By comparison, the book’s weaknesses are the ordinary kind – the sort a reader notices and forgives. Pais is a generous explainer, and occasionally too generous: Izzy has an experience at camp, comes home, and narrates it to her parents at the dinner table, where one of them draws out its meaning in a patient paragraph. The instinct is a loving one, and in a book aimed partly at classroom and read-aloud use it is not without purpose, but it does occasionally hold readers at one remove from experiences they might have had directly. A chapter of party preparation arrives at the point where the September deadline ought to be tightening, and the pressure slackens for a while. And Izzy herself is a shade more accomplished than she needs to be – the best rider, the natural leader, the girl who knows why ferns thrive anywhere. A chapter in which she badly and shamefully wanted to say yes to Sam would have cost her nothing in sympathy and given her eventual answer a price.

The closing pages will divide readers. Sam reveals that the Council selected Izzy because she is destined to be one of three people who will one day dismantle the color system — a turn that sets up the sequel efficiently but sits at a slight angle to a novel that has spent its length arguing that worth is not conferred at birth. Some will read it as a promise; others will wish Izzy had been nobody in particular and chosen correctly regardless. It is worth noting that both readings lead to the same conversation, which is presumably the point.

Comparisons to The Giver, A Wrinkle in Time, and Wonder are invited by the publisher and are not unearned. Pais does not have Lowry’s chill or Palacio’s ear for cruelty, but he shares with both an unwillingness to condescend, and he has built something Lowry and Palacio did not: a world where the injustice is visible on every face and impossible to argue with. For teachers, this is the rare allegory that supplies its own discussion questions. For parents, it is a book about prejudice that will not frighten a sensitive child. For readers between roughly eight and fourteen, it is a story in which the most important choice belongs entirely to someone their own age – and in which the adults, remarkably, step back and let her make it.

Rating: ★★★★½

Verdict

A clean, humane and quietly ambitious middle grade novel built on one of the best central premises in recent children’s science fiction. Its occasional over-explanation and a heroine who could stand to be a little less capable are small debts against considerable strengths: a world a child can reason inside, antagonists granted interior lives, an apology on a woodland trail that says more about prejudice than most adult novels manage, and a revelation about a birth mother that will stop readers of any age. Izzy’s Dilemma asks a question worth carrying around, then trusts its audience to answer it. Highly recommended, and a natural fit for classrooms, family reading, and any young reader who has wondered whether it would be easier to be someone else.