Perfect for fans of Thirteen Reasons Why and Looking for Alaska, Jennifer Weiner, #1 New York Times bestselling author, calls Elizabeth LaBan’sThe Tragedy Paper“a beguiling and beautifully written tale of first love and heartbreak.”
It follows the story of Tim Macbeth, a seventeen-year-old albino and a recent transfer to the prestigious Irving School, where the motto is “Enter here to be and find a friend.” A friend is the last thing Tim expects or wants—he just hopes to get through his senior year unnoticed. Yet, despite his efforts to blend into the background, he finds himself falling for the quintessential “It” girl, Vanessa Sheller, girlfriend of Irving’s most popular boy. To Tim's surprise, Vanessa is into him, too, but she can kiss her social status goodbye if anyone ever finds out. Tim and Vanessa begin a clandestine romance, but looming over them is the Tragedy Paper, Irving’s version of a senior year thesis, assigned by the school’s least forgiving teacher.
Jumping between viewpoints of the love-struck Tim and Duncan, a current senior about to uncover the truth of Tim and Vanessa, The Tragedy Paper is a compelling tale of forbidden love and the lengths people will go to keep their secrets.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Tragically underdeveloped
By Bookphile
The Tragedy Paper was a book that I really wanted to love. It had all the elements of the types of books that tend to draw me in: the closed, high-stakes environment of an elite prep boarding school, a secret that shatters the lives of the characters, and an outcast looking to find his niche. Unfortunately, the story didn't do justice to any of these attributes. Some spoilers to follow.First, I'll start with the outcast angle--it's not much of an angle at all. Yes, Tim feels like a misfit because he's an albino. The portrayal of his struggles with this were often very interesting, and I could sympathize with his agony over that fact that, no matter how much he wants to just blend in, he never will. There was some good depth to this aspect of the story. However, Tim also doesn't try very hard to become a part of his environment. Instead, he spends the bulk of the book mooning over Vanessa. If he'd been shunned, this might have worked, but the only person who seems actively hostile toward him is Patrick. Other students reach out to Tim, but all he's interested in is obsessing over Vanessa.As for Patrick...I can feel myself making a face as I write about him. He felt so one dimensional to me, and I could not figure out a single reason why Vanessa might have been attracted to him. For that matter, I couldn't figure out what Vanessa couldn't be honest about how she felt about Tim. The book tries to imply that there's some sort of taboo about the two of them being together, but Tim seems more concerned with his albinism than most of the other characters do. He's the one who tells himself Vanessa can't possibly like him because he's an albino, and I think he does both himself and Vanessa a disservice. The intent may have been to show the push-pull Vanessa felt toward Tim, but I never got that. I couldn't shake the feeling that the real obstacle to their relationship was Tim's own sense of self-consciousness.I didn't find the setting particularly well done either. The school barely exists for all the role it plays in the lives of the characters. In fact, it mainly seems to exist as a plot device. The Tragedy Paper is supposed to be this big, overwhelming assignment--it's even the title of the book!--but it gets very little page time. Tim skips classes and homework with abandon and none of the teachers ever sit down with him and ask him what's going on? I don't buy it. I think this book falls into the YA trap: the adults are all incompetent and clueless. It'd be one thing if someone made a deliberate attempt and Tim evaded them, but every adult in the book seems to just shrug and walk away, accepting Tim's answers. I would think that a teacher in a school like that would be far more canny after having lived with teenagers in such a closed environment year after year.When the secret was revealed, it felt anticlimactic to me--most likely because I saw it coming from ten miles away. Tim's mea culpa didn't do much for me. What happens is entirely his fault, and I didn't sympathize much with him. It would have been better had the tragedy come about despite his good intentions or for a million other reasons but, in the end, it was a matter of his just being a dumb teenager. This would have been okay if the story had been about his lack of judgement and the aftermath, but after all the buildup, the tragedy just fell flat.My biggest annoyance with the book, though, was the framed narrative. It didn't work, period. There was no reason to have Duncan in the book other than to provide Tim with a vehicle for telling his story and making his confession--which could have been done without Duncan even being there. The story initially makes it seem like Duncan has some sort of integral role in the events, but he doesn't. I know the idea was to show how one seemingly small choice could have untold consequences, but it would have worked better had Duncan figured more prominently earlier in the novel, when Tim is laying out the groundwork for what led up to the tragedy. I was annoyed by the interruptions whenever there was a small, unnecessary section about some inconsequential thing Duncan was doing.This isn't a completely bad book, though. The writing is really nice at times, and the concept was a good one. With some more work, I think this novel could have been really good.
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Rare in One Respect
By Ken C.
THE TRAGEDY PAPER's focus is a love triangle between 17-year-olds at a boarding school. What makes it a rarity in the YA field is how "clean" it is. Anyone reading YA these days knows that, as a genre, young adult literature has grown up and skewed strongly toward more adult themes, language, and issues. Not so with Elizabeth Laban's debut novel. The book is wall to wall free of profanity or R-rated acts of any sort. It's just a straight-out, old-fashioned love story -- with a few quirks.Quirk #1: It starts and circles back like S.E. Hinton's THE OUTSIDERS for no other reason than (according to the afterword) Hinton's book -- another "clean" read, thanks to the era it was written -- is one of Laban's favorites.Quirk #2: The protagonist is an albino. This reminded me of Palascio's WONDER, in a way. Obviously the characters here are much older, but still, Tim Macbeth (I kid you not) stands out like a white light that draws stares from all around. He is another case of a "marked man" in the lead, against all odds.Quirk #3: THE TRAGEDY PAPER is a book within a book. It's mostly about Tim's love for a girl named Vanessa, who happens to be attached to that predictable YA staple, the most handsome and athletic popular jock in the school (here named Patrick). But Tim's entire narrative is told, THIRTEEN REASONS WHY-like, via tape (CDs in this case). The listener? A new senior named Duncan (again, I kid you not), a year on the heels of the triangular leads, who listens to the recordings because he happens to get Tim's room from the fateful year before. Neatly enough, he, like Tim, has a romantic interest he is pursuing.Quirk #4: The book seems to be contemporary, yet reflects little of its time in history and how modern teens' lifestyles are today. At one point, up early in the morning, one character uses the line "Time to make the doughnuts" as a joke. What 17-year-old would understand THAT allusion, I wondered. The Dunkin Donuts commercial came out in the 80s. More strangely still, I think cell phones are mentioned once, and one big event in the novel -- a secret "outing" planned by Patrick -- is advertised via handwritten posters over a series of days. This jars in an almost anachronistic way. What kids that age would bother with such an old-school, labor-intensive, and clearly dangerous (if you don't want to be discovered) method of announcing a party? Does the word "texting" mean nothing to this book?Quirk #5: The Tragedy Paper itself, an assignment from Irving School's English teacher Mr. Simon, plays a minor role throughout. You keep expecting it to somehow play a larger role, but no. The only connection is that, by definition, both book and assignment are tragedies. As for DEAD POETS SOCIETY-like scenes in the classroom, few and far between.Overall, the book scored high marks for its storyline and flowing style. Is it in the upper tier of boarding school books? Hardly. And it loses steam toward the end, where it meets an almost anti-climactic end. Still, the narrative pulls you along with its steady current, and you wonder as much as Duncan does how all of Tim and Vanessa's troubles will pull together. In the end, and ironically enough, I felt as if the book needed a more tragic end than it got. Weird, huh? Nevertheless, I admired Laban for what she accomplished here and think many students, from middle school on up, will agree.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.Haunting coming-of-age story
By kacunnin
At its core, Elizabeth LaBan's THE TRAGEDY PAPER is a coming-of-age tale very much like A SEPARATE PEACE - two teenage boys wrestle with such things as love, loyalty, fear, and insecurity at a prestigious prep school. What sets THE TRAGEDY PAPER apart is how its story is told. Seventeen-year-old Duncan Meade begins his senior year at the Irving School with a mixture of anxiety and excitement - he gets to live in the cool "senior dorm," with the best view on campus, he gets to find out what his "treasure" will be (all Irving graduates leave something special for the rising seniors who will be moving into their rooms in the fall), and he gets to plan the Game (sort of a glorified "senior prank," one of the school's traditions). But something happened the year before, near the end of Duncan's junior year, which makes him uncertain about how his senior year will go. And then there's the Tragedy Paper, a year-long project assigned by the Senior English teacher, which is never far from Duncan's mind. So we get Duncan's story (he loves pretty Daisy, but can't quite bring himself to let her know, and he can't get whatever happened last year out of his mind) and we get Tim Macbeth's story. Tim, a reclusive albino who spent only one semester at Irving, lived in Duncan's room the year before. And he leaves Duncan a very unusual "treasure" - a set of CDs on which he has recorded everything that happened leading up to the mysterious event that colored Duncan's junior year. Duncan begins listening to Tim's story, and he becomes quickly engrossed. And so do the readers. In fact, Tim's story is so much more interesting than Duncan's that I found myself skimming over the Duncan parts to get to the Tim parts (Tim's simmering affection for Vanessa forms a nice counterpoint to Duncan's own fixation on Daisy).In part, THE TRAGEDY PAPER is a mystery - what happened last year, how was Duncan involved, how was Tim involved, and what is the connection between Duncan and Tim? LaBan laces her novel with hints about what happened, and suggestions that tragedy is often much closer to home than we might think (Shakespeare is considered a master for a reason!). And all of this works to create a seductive narrative that's very hard to put down. Both Duncan and Tim are interesting characters, and Vanessa is intriguing. I was always filled with questions about her motives, her feelings, and her relationship with both Tim and her popular boyfriend, Patrick.That said, there is something about THE TRAGEDY PAPER that doesn't quite work. Maybe it's because the mysterious thing that happened isn't as monumental as we are led to believe. I was expecting something much more traumatic than what is ultimately revealed (there are just so many veiled hints of things that reminded me of DEAD POETS SOCIETY and A SEPARATE PEACE). Additionally, I felt a bit let down once Tim's story concluded - my connection throughout was to him and I felt a huge desire to hear from him directly, beyond his disembodied voice on those CDs.Overall, I really enjoyed reading THE TRAGEDY PAPER. Irving School seems like a very cool place (with some really cool teachers and a bunch of unique and fun traditions that would make being a student there very interesting). Tim's story, especially, is beautifully told. I would recommend this to anyone interested in coming-of-age stories, and to anyone who is currently (or ever was!) a high school student. It's a good novel. I will not soon forget it.
