It’s a technique she uses over and over again. Another thing Leyh does really well is to suggest something (this person is a witch), then deny it (nah, she’s just a weird old lady), then slowly circle back around to the original theory but with a new feeling behind it (um, maybe she’s a witch after all, but we need a better understanding of what witches are). She also teaches Snap how to take care of a heap of orphaned baby possums.
Jacks turns out to make her living from cleaning up roadkill and putting the animals’ skeletons back together to sell online.
All this might seem spoilery, but it’s within the first 20 pages of the book, and much is to follow. Searching for Good Boy, she bravely wanders into the home of the town witch, who’s rumored to eat roadkill and cast spells with their bones, only to find a tough old woman named Jacks, whose hard exterior contrasts with her soft interior (something Leyh shows when Jacks takes off the wide-brimmed black hat and long black robe she wears outside to reveal Crocs, flowered Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt of a cat in a cowboy hat saying “Meowdy!”). She doesn’t like most people, just animals, and she behaves like an angry, frightened animal herself plenty of the time. Jess’s ex-boyfriend is no longer in the picture, but he clearly brought trouble. It’s not that her mom is absent-she’s very present when she’s around, but she’s working and going to school, and she needs Snap to pull her weight. She lives with her mom (Jessamine) and her dog (Good Boy) in a trailer, and pretty much takes care of herself. Snapdragon herself, who goes by Snap, is a black tween who likes to gather her hair up in two long bunches that resemble antlers as much as the trumpet-like shapes of the flower she’s named after. Snapdragon is a great example of those skills. With a few deft gestures, she cracks your ribcage right open, revealing the gooshy stuff inside, and massages and squeezes it all, producing intense emotions and, in the end, a feeling that you’ve been cleaned out, for the better. Leyh, best known for her work on Lumberjanes, has a real ability to perform a kind of open-heart surgery on her readers. Could this little YA book really be as good as I remembered it being? Welp, I read it again and the answer is yes. In the meantime, my feelings about it faded and dulled. I read Kat Leyh’s Snapdragon for the first time several months ago with zero context, when it arrived in a box of advance reader’s copies.
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