Shatter is a must read for teens who eat and care about romance, sustainable food production, and social justice. Nikki Trionfo’s YA novel hearkens to the fighting families from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, likening them to feuding growers and pickers in California’s orchards. Shatter also resonates with John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, because it too revolves around the human cost of food production.
Shatter is set in the small agricultural community of Verona where tensions between peach growers and farm laborers fan flames of cultural mistrust into deadly violence. High school students take sides, a migrant worker goes missing, and peach pickers go on strike. The multi-million dollar peach crop rots in the orchards. Adding to that tension is 16-year old Salem Jefferson’s virgin lips which seek to be kissed.
Salem Jefferson is a socially awkward teenage girl grieving the accidental death of her older sister. But when the missing union worker’s body is found on the Jefferson peach farm, Salem feels driven to determine the man’s cause of death, convinced that her sister was murdered because of the same forces. Growers have hired Hispanic gang members to do dirty work in the past. Gang members dot her school and become her primary suspects.
Cordero is a mysterious boy in Salem’s English class. When the teacher assigns students to put on a mock trial of the Kennedy assassination Cordero and Salem must work together. Coincidences build as the mistrust between Cordero, a Mexican farm labor boy with a gang tattoo, and Salem, a grower’s daughter escalates. Much like Romeo and Juliet, these modern teens feel romantic but forbidden attraction for each other.
Salem and Cordero must examine the destruction causes by distrust, false assumptions, and stereotypes in their search for truth.
Beyond the killer’s need to stay undetected are the needs of life and community that build Verona. The farm laborers strike seeking more money. Growers refuse, citing sharply rising production costs. And all the while the average consumer demands cheap food in the grocery store, even if that food is imported to keep the prices down. Imported food means less grower revenue and fewer farm worker jobs. Each side makes demands without holistic comprehension of competing needs. Those demands threaten to destroy an entire industry and with it the people whose lives depend on it. Cordero must decide the value of Salem’s life and what he is willing to risk for her, himself, and for the needs of his people, even if they are gang members.
Shatter examines the needs of food producers, farm workers, and consumers through the lens of high school students’ involvement in an activist group. This involvement leads the reader to feel what the human cost of food production really is through the lives of Salem and Cordero, driven forward by the sweet possibility of their first kiss. This book rocks!
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