An inventive, deeply emotional story of a teenage girl forced to find her voice or risk collapsing under a weight not meant for her
So many kids experience bullying in high school, and unfortunately, Ramie is no exception. She is a hyper-vigilant and self-aware teenager who endures cruelty at school only to return to a broken home when the day’s done and cope with prematurely becoming responsible for her younger brother Alex. After all, her dad said, “Take care of the kid, Ramie. That’s your job. That woman [her mother] is a freakin idiot. You’re the one in charge,” as he high-tailed it out of their lives.
So when she wakes up one morning and her brother’s gone, she panics and berates herself, and all her mom (who she calls “The Mom” because she’s always absent and feels alien) can do is worry about being late for work while absently calling his name as she rushes out the door. As the situation with Alex becomes more complex and concerning, she must face the trauma she has been carrying and running from for so long, as well as her mother.
The novel moves from reality, which she terms NORML (the socially regulated world of school and family that feels like a constant battle for survival), and the interior world she escapes to through The Thin Door, when things become too much. The Thin Door allows her to create a world she’d rather exist in, or when she slips, she confronts the Echo Chamber, a psychic space that feeds on her trauma and echoes internalized voices of abuse.
Experiences, such as with Saharah, the school’s popular girl who mocks her body and clothes often calling her twitch due to the uncontrollable twitch she gets in her eye sometimes, reinforce her sense of disposability and feed directly into the Echo Chamber, which she describes as a sudden internal ambush of voices that tell her things such as, “you’re on your own kid,” and “you lost him.”
The structure and visual design shift to stylized typography and include drawings and margin text, with emphasized words that reflect the emotional and mental state she’s in, vivifying her Thin Door experiences. This is where the novel truly stands out.
Unconventional in its hybrid structure, The Thin Door by Rho Weber Mack wields interactive prompts such as in its “UPSIDE DOWN” sections (which are literally upside down) to keep readers engaged. It’s not only the plot that we have to stay on our toes for; it’s how Mack is going to tell it.
When a new teacher arrives for the class on Health and Social Issues, telling them to disorganize their perfectly arranged desks for better thinking, the book literally flips sideways to mimic this. Despite this being a standout feature, the frequent interruptions for reflection prompts and exercises can sometimes disrupt the book’s flow and assimilation.
Amid the gloominess of her life, the romantic longing and emotional vulnerability she expresses in her inner world through Xavier, a boy whose presence oscillates between tenderness and coercive fantasy, remind us that this is all very real and she’s just a teenage girl. Sadly, in the Echo Chamber, he becomes controlling and tells her things such as, “Don’t be such a Twitch… Don’t make me do it,” blurring desire with submission and fear and showing how fantasy can mirror trauma, even as she struggles to leave her trauma behind.
Using The Echo Chamber, Mack does a stellar job in reflecting the truth of how internalized trauma operates beyond memory to become an active force, echoing parental blame and peer cruelty and even romantic coercion with an unsettling precision.
A raw and haunting, trauma-informed novel, The Thin Door is inventive in its structure and so real in its lived experience.
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