CW: Attempted suicide ( )

Rating: 3.5

15-year-old Kyle Carroll’s best friend since kindergarten, Jason Bishop, sleeps over at the Carroll house one Friday in early October, the evening before the big homecoming American football game at the high school. On Saturday morning, as the friends wait for breakfast, they walk out into the backyard. Still in their pyjamas on this chilly autumn morning, they end up in Kyle’s father’s shed. Within minutes, at 9:16 am, Jason is shot with a gun that Mr. Carroll forgot he even had. At 10:46 a.m., Jason, now at the local hospital, is declared dead, and since all signs point to Kyle’s being the shooter, he is taken into custody.

Within days, the juvenile court judge remands Kyle to three years’ probation under the strict supervision of his parole officer. He is also to receive ongoing psychological evaluation by the state-appointed psychiatrist. Although Kyle still doesn’t know what happened in the backyard shed, he finds the sentence inappropriately lenient and says so: “‘It didn’t make sense. It was an open-and-shut case. I killed him. I confessed. And they send me home because it was an ‘unfortunate incident’?”

The central problem in Ayarbe’s young adult novel is that Kyle can recall nothing about those moments preceding his friend’s demise. He has sessions with a psychiatrist and says little. With his utterly flat affect and atypical behaviour, Kyle appears to be in some sort of dissociative state. Wondering what’s wrong with this boy, the reader presses on to find an answer which the author seems reluctant to provide. Knowing of Kyle’s interest in film, his psychiatrist recommends that he write a screenplay of the scene to try to access the memories his mind is hiding from him. Later, a school librarian provides him with a place of refuge, encouragement, and understanding.

Using first-person narration and relying heavily on flashbacks, Ayarbe slowly—too slowly—reveals the story of the boys’ friendship, which had apparently been fraying in recent months. Prior to high school, Jason, like Kyle, had been something of a loner. At the start of tenth grade, however, he’d “ditched” Kyle, who was perhaps becoming a social liability. While Kyle ate alone in the cafeteria, Jason went off campus for lunch with a new gang of popular, athletic boys. After his friend’s death, Kyle replays memory after memory of their decade-long friendship. He also converses with his dead friend, visits his grave, and watches out for Jason’s precocious eight-year-old brother, Chase, a victim of bullying.

Kyle is a movie buff who had hoped to pursue a career in film. The book makes mention of numerous directors and movies, not all of them familiar or meaningful to me. It’s hard to imagine a younger reader finding much value in these references either. However, Ayarbe does use the language of filmmaking effectively to communicate Kyle’s mental processes. He “fast forwards”; wishes he could “edit”; speaks of “scenes”, “takes”, “cuts”, and “rewinding”, and he also thinks about the “freeze frame” in his life—the vivid, motionless scene when action and time were suspended and his friend lay dying in front of him. Kyle realizes that if he were a director, he could change everything, but the movie that plays in his head cannot change, and nothing is under his control.

Initially, Kyle is not a particularly likeable character, and I questioned whether his amnesia was enough of a premise on which to build a novel. I soldiered on, however, and this time it paid off. I discovered what had occurred in the shed that Saturday morning in autumn, and I warmed to Kyle in the process.

Freeze Frame is not a perfect book. First of all, there are a few too many flashbacks to scenes of childhood. Second, the screenplays written in the style of a number of different directors—Tarantino, Lynch, and Hitchcock, to name a few—become tiresome after a while. And, finally, there are plot developments that I found a little hard to credit. Even so, there is still lots to appreciate in this novel. Ayarbe is an ambitious writer. The story she presents and the issues it raises are hardly run-of-the-mill young adult fare. I laud her for that. ( )

Losing your best friend hurts, when you lose him twice, as Kyle does, its so painful his mind refuses to allow him to remember what really happened the second time. He and Jason were besties, living less than a block from each other. Jason longed to become an artist, drawing ever more detailed comic characters. Both his little brother Chase and Kyle were drawn as super heroes, Chase as Kite Rider and Jason as Freeze Frame. Kyle's dream was to become a movie maker and he was obsessed with watching videos and trying to dissect them so he could understand how directors worked.
When Jason started hanging out with new friends, Kyle didn't know how to deal with it. On the surface, the friendship was still solid, but the less time they spent together, the more he started hurting inside. Jason comes over for a weekend visit and something terrible happens in the shed behind the house. Kyle snaps out of a shocked daze to see blood everywhere and Jason lying on the shed floor. He can't remember exactly what happened. One thing does become clear to him. Jason is dying and he's responsible.
What unfolds after this is painful to read at times, while sucking you in a bit more on almost every page. It made me feel intensely for Kyle. He doesn't question his responsibility, but his guilt and grief lead him to numerous choices and actions that upset others and make those who care for him question what's going on in his head. Lost hardly begins to describe how he feels and every time he attempts to recreate the events, switching from movie director to movie director, he ends up in freeze frame at the critical moment.
It takes his promise to protect Chase from bullying at the elementary school, the friendship of Mr. Cordoba, a most unlikely high school librarian, the friendship of Kohana, another teen who understands the role of outcast better than almost anyone and numerous talks to Jason in the graveyard for Kyle to put the pieces together. The result is healing, not only for him, but for almost everyone affected by this tragedy.
It's an excellent book for teens who have, or are grappling with guilt or remorse as well as those who like a book that hits the reader with an emotional body blow. ( )

Teen: The creativity behind the writing is phenomenal. Heidi Ayarbe takes a story and puts it into the perspective of a director, but still manages to keep the storyline clear.

Adult: The story was much, much more than I expected. This is mostly Kyle's story, but the author does an exceptional job showing how Jason's death affected others, from his siblings and parents to his peers at school.

Pros: The first chapter is very explosive. Although the story is told in distortion, and yet still tragic, I was motivated to keep reading. It kept my attention.

Very interesting, if a bit depressing.