‘Pentangle’ makes use of stereotypical teens

PENTANGLE, by Susan Vaughan, Starlight Writer Publications, 2000, 81 pages, $3.75 (downloaded from the Internet)

FORT KENT – No one ever said being a teen-ager is easy. Historically, the angst and insecurities experienced by adolescents and fueled by hormones have been fertile ground for legions of writers from Shakespeare to Judy Blume.

Maine writer Susan Vaughan is the latest entry into the teen literary world with her first full-length novel, “Pentangle.”

Set on the Maine coast, it is the story of Jessica Canaan, a 16-year-old orphan newly arrived in town at the latest of a string of foster homes. The book is described by the publisher as, “A young adult romantic suspense” novel.

Vaughan has a good basic premise for her work. Her lead character, Jessica, has been moved with great regularity from foster home to foster home for most of the 13 years she has been an orphan.

She has learned not to make friends or become involved in anticipation of the inevitable separation.

Add to that the fact that Jessica has next to no knowledge of her own background, save for a locket bearing a crude pentangle, a symbol of the occult, scratched into its interior – and you have a character with plenty of potential depth to explore.

Trouble is, Vaughan never takes the steps to explore those depths. The biggest glimpses into Jessica’s character come from excerpts of a parallel story told through Jessica as written in her journal and featuring characters and language straight from a “Star Wars” movie.

With this story-within-a-story, Vaughan not so subtly reflects Jessica’s own internal confusions and anxieties, with heroes and villains mirroring the two new men in her life.

There’s “wry, rugged Hamm Phipps,” good-guy son of a fisherman. As an added wholesome bonus, the blond-headed Phipps even has a golden retriever puppy.

Then there’s “darkly handsome” Derek LaVoie, troublemaking rich-kid son of one of the town’s prime movers and shakers. The dark-haired LaVoie is also head of a mysterious teen cult, The Circle.

We also meet LaVoie’s sometime girlfriend who spends most of the book stoned or worse; his two cronies whose sole function seems to be sneaking around at night to give Jessica someone to follow; and a slightly crazed nerdy schoolmate with a floating laboratory.

In other words, there are enough hackneyed teen-age stereotypes in this book to sink a fishing boat. Which, in fact, does happen. But only after the story itself sinks under the weight of its own predictability and stilted language.

As Jessica directs her affections back and forth between the two young men, she must also deal with her new home and a foster mother whose “quirky mood swings” suggest some sort of personality disorder. Add to this the constant appearances of tarot cards, magic potions and threatening occultlike messages in her new home and you have a teen-ager in for one wild ride.

But the ride never really takes off and Vaughan never lets her characters develop beyond two-dimensional stereotypes.

A sign of the times in which today’s teens find themselves, the book is not available in traditional print media, but can be downloaded from the Internet or purchased in CD-ROM format from Starlight Writer Publications at www. starpublications.com.

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