Review by Vanessa Bedford Gill
Heartdrum, 2023
352 pages, hardcover, $24.99 CAD, 9780063086210
Young Adult, Ages 14+
Fiction
The only thing found in weeks of searching: her empty neon-orange backpack. The notebook she carried around everywhere was missing too. Like Kiki had been nothing but a shadow all along.
A specter haunting their lives.
Except when she was younger, when her mom lived in town – Before with a capital B – Kiki had always been solid. Loud and brash, with big hair to go alongside her large personality. She dimmed a little after her mom’s murder. But even that Kiki wouldn’t go down without a fight. Without evidence. Without leaving a mark.
And her family had stopped searching.
They’d given in. To her loss.
The empty backpack had crushed them.
When Jen Ferguson, author of Those Pink Mountain Nights, was a teenager, she worked in a local pizzeria. I wonder if she knew that she would be incorporating memories of her part-time job into a novel about identity, friendship, and trauma?
Before the book begins, readers are given a content warning letter in the first few pages of the novel, providing space to pick up the book when the timing is right. Throughout the novel, the three main characters, Berlin, Cameron, and Jessie create meaning in each other’s lives, even when it appears they have little in common. What draws these three teens together is Kiki, Cameron’s cousin, who has disappeared. And when the threat of a corporate takeover of their beloved pizza shop occurs, they will come together to fight for their neighbourhood too.
Things are not what they seem in Pink Mountain Pizza. Perception is an overarching motif in this book: missed sightings, blurred meanings, and even references to the Surrealist, Magritte, and his painting of a pipe – except it is not a pipe. Perceptions of reality affect everyone in this book, whether they are ready to face them or not. Ferguson’s effortless adolescent dialogue softens the heavy content of the book, which includes missing Indigenous women in Canada, and childhood cancer. The layers and sub-layers in this book add to the mystery, as does the dramatic denouement.
Ferguson is certainly not dishing up a thin crusted one topping type of story here. Instead, she feeds us a deep dish, multi-layered experience, writing books that are fresh, yet resonate. Winner of the Governor General’s Award for her debut novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, Ferguson should also win an award for inducing food cravings in readers. With her first novel set at an ice cream shack, and her second in a pizza parlour, I’m hoping that her third novel occurs on a vegetable farm!
Readers will be drawn into the fast-paced world of high school and Pink Mountain Pizza, all while exploring themes of social justice. Ferguson has once again crafted a satisfying YA novel that readers will reflect on long after the final page.
Vanessa Bedford Gill is a Librarian and pursuing her MA in Children’s Literature at UBC. She enjoys creative writing, travelling, and drinking copious amounts of tea while reading picture books to her four children, even though they tell her that they are far too old for this pastime!
YOUNG ADULTING 