book of the week

the cosmos heals itself

T I T L E

the cosmos heals itself

A U T H O R

skatekitchen

S Y N O P S I S

(as copied from book)

The summer before everyone ships off to college, Astrid Lang plans on unearthing two things: (a) the truth behind Riot, the anonymous graffiti artist whose brilliant works have been splashed across the city, and (b) why her friendship with Jordan Wyatt fell apart.

T H O U G H T S

To be honest, this story nearly made me bawl my eyes out.

The Cosmos Heals Itself, by skatekitchen, is not intended to be a sad story. This is not a story of death or destruction, or of an irreparable wound.

But as an artist, a dancer, a musician, and a painter, the fact that someone could find such pure joy in art---a creation spun from our tired hands and minds---is something that brings tears to my heartstrings. The fact that she’s Asian just makes it all the more relatable.

Meet Astrid Lang. She runs through the alleys and side streets of New York City at night, in search of another boy doing the same; as soon as he paints the streets in color, she follows, capturing the fleeting moment in an image on her camera.
This mysterious boy, as you may have guessed, is the Riot mentioned in the synopsis, a nameless and unknown entity to everyone except Astrid---after all, she met him once, and he painted her, a girl among the stars.

Star-crossed lovers, no?

But this is no Romeo and Juliet; as we find out early on, Riot is the pseudonym of Jordan Wyatt, Astrid’s schoolmate and former best friend who she now can’t look in the eye. But when Jordan promises to help Astrid find Riot, the blindfolds begin to slip off of their faces---for Jordan to see the girl desperate to find the shadow of a boy she loves, and for Astrid to see a boy whose art is what saves him every time through the heartbreak.

Somewhere along the line, race comes up in a discussion, and we find out that Astrid is Chinese and Jordan is half-Indian, half-Caucasian. But this doesn’t seem to matter to them---and nor should it. Yes, culture is important, but if they had never mentioned it, I never would have guessed; this subtle diversity is such a powerful thing because when many of us read a book, we automatically assume the characters to be white.

How many of you, when seeing the name Jordan Wyatt, thought he would be a stereotypical white boy?
That’s how I thought for a long time; it’s only books like these that have really let me see how blind our society has become to the ingrained racism.

However, that is only a small part of what makes this story so interesting to me; their ethnicities are only a fragment of two intense characters that are somehow equally real and equally part of a dream we are desperate to remember as we wake up.
Jordan walks the tightrope between Jordan and Riot; Riot tells him that Astrid must be kept away from his secret, while Jordan tells him to go after the friend he lost.

There’s one really potent line that has stuck with me in the tenth chapter---"I'm the guy you're looking for, he wanted to say, I'm standing right here but you're talking about a guy who you've made up in your head. A guy who's going places with art that rips out hearts and was kind to you and never stopped thinking about you since. A guy who's not me."

There is such poetry in this description.
Pure beauty.

It’s what makes these characters so vivid and so very real, because even though they are just teenagers living through the last summer before college, they are complex human beings, teeming with secrets and dreams and hopes. Just as Jordan walks the line between his two identities, our author walks the line between poetry and prose, between dreams and reality, creating a plot that is ever so complex but ever so simple at the same time---boy meets girl, yet boy didn’t really meet girl.

Unlike many books, where one character gets so much more screen time than another, this one is remarkably balanced, alternating between Jordan and Astrid, who is just as colourful---framed in a vignette of her camera and New York City.

Astrid may not be a typical Asian girl; she flunked high school, was second-best, and didn’t get scholarships to any universities. What she lacks in academics, however, she makes up in her love of art, just like Jordan, and that was what drew me into her story.
Even though Astrid just considers herself the photographer of the art, I think in the end she is an artist herself, creating those images by hand (with one of those old film cameras that require a darkroom) with her passion. She created Riot, sharing his story and painting a picture of a boy everyone thought was too good to be true---and yet, Astrid believes in him, because that’s what artists do.

This is a story of a pair of artists, separate yet together, real yet dreamed, poetry yet prose, boy and girl, reaching out hesitantly to take each other’s blindfolds off.

This summer, I’ll be going out to NYC to study at the New York Times Summer Academy, where I’ll be studying the connection between art and the city.

Maybe I’ll find Jordan and Astrid and Riot. Maybe I won’t.

But in the end, we all walk the line between ourselves and our art.

•••

written by teamiyazaki
edited by xohrats