The First Stone

The First Stone provides an in-depth look at Reef’s emotional and mental instability. He struggles with impulse control, anger management, substance abuse, and severe anti-social tendencies. The other boys at the North Hills home add pyromania and kleptomania to the list. The adolescents in the book lash out and commit crimes—both small and large—out of retaliation against a world that doesn’t want them. The characters’ suffering largely stems from a lack of effective guardians and mentors.

Young adult literature is a useful medium for examining the nature of suffering caused by physical and/or mental instability. Pain and suffering are part of life, but many young people have parents and authority figures who do whatever they can to prevent pain from forcing their children to grow up too quickly. Without parental figures, the pain becomes the teenager’s teacher. In Reef’s case, suffering teaches him that no one will look out for him, he should strike first to avoid being hurt by someone else, and he should not be optimistic about his future.

By examining young adults in turmoil, authors have a rich opportunity to portray injustice and the darker aspects of human nature. For instance, one of the most horrific aspects of Susanne Collins’s bestselling The Hunger Games series is that children are specifically targeted for suffering. They are forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of the populace, and their suffering is the entire point. In Neal Shusterman’s novel Challenger Deep, the teenage narrator has paranoid schizophrenia. In The Fault in Our Stars, several teenage characters have cancer and other life-threatening physical maladies.

Suffering is rich territory for an author because it forces universal questions and recognition about issues such as the nature of good and evil, justice, and morality. Not everyone will experience cancer, an amputation, or substance abuse. However, everyone understands pain, suffering, and appetite.

That certainty doesn’t apply to books about the suffering caused by parental neglect, drug addiction, poor choices, unchecked or undiscovered illnesses, or sudden, unexpected accidents. Nearly anyone who reads The First Stone or the other novels previously mentioned will find an echo of something familiar, even if it’s only a worry. Suffering is a universal constant and is a mainstay of art across all mediums. The suffering of young adults elevates the philosophical arguments about the purpose—or senselessness—of suffering.

Finally, suffering also requires people to question what will give meaning to their existence. A person who vanishes into their suffering—as Leeza does in the days following her coma—identifies solely with her suffering. Suffering can become an identity. The nature of how one deals with their relationship to their own suffering is ripe for exploration as a human constant in the young adult genre, which often deals with such big-picture coming-of-age questions as the genre’s primary audience matures into adulthood.