The Vanishing Station

Ruby Santos has graduated from high school in San Francisco just a couple of months ago. She’s inherited the love of painting she had always admired in her Mom, a recent victim of cancer. The hospital bills have left Ruby and her Filipino Dad with very little money – so no chance now for her to go to Art School as she had planned. She’s working as a house painter, as well as struggling to prop up her father, a drunken echo of the man he was, when he had often worked abroad for long periods; as we later learn, those absences were dictated by the demands of a ruthless criminal organisation from which he could not escape.

Ruby’s narration often leaves much to be inferred. The novel makes few concessions to UK readers, from preserving US spellings in the text to setting much of the action in a brutal San Francisco underworld, among streets littered with dirty heroin needles, very different from the conventional tourist image of the city. At times, those readers may also fear they are losing the plot, often at its most dramatic moments, since they will have no idea what’s meant by ‘jumping the train portals’ – a skill which drives much of the action of the novel. One minute, readers are riding the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) with a desperate, endangered Ruby, and the next – by way of a ‘jump’ powered by never-to-be-explained storybook magic – they discover her relaxing on a different train among the tranquil snows of Norway, or languishing in the steamy heat of a disused siding in the Taman Negara jungle on the borders of Thailand and Malaysia.  Adult readers might well, at such moments, identify a use of Magical Realism – not, as far as I know, a narrative strategy likely to be familiar to many YA readers.

Soon, Ruby herself is caught in the clutches of the criminal organisation which has destroyed her Dad’s life, led by the glamorous matriarch, Madame M. Essential to her activities is her control of certain stations on the BART, which she maintains through her three sons, her lieutenants in the organisation; they are known to lesser members of the international operation by the names of three important stations, while Madame herself is code-named ‘Embarcadero’, BART’s major transit hub.  Madame has shrewdly anticipated that Ruby will have inherited her Dad’s amazing gift for ‘jumping the portals’, which involves leaping from the flexible link between carriages on one train to land, intentionally,  in the flexible link between the carriages of  another train which might be anywhere in the world. Madame needs Ruby to replace her Dad, engaging in anything from carrying secret messages between continents to drug trafficking.

Ruby’s own inner world which her narrative reveals is always interestingly complex, reflecting her determination, her courage and her intelligence. As Ruby is drawn into Madame’s web, she finds a surprising ally in Montgomery, one of the sons. We can watch their developing feelings for each other only from Ruby’s limited perspective. At times, Montgomery can seem inscrutable, even two dimensional, torn between the obligations of the life his mother has shaped for him and an uncertain, exploratory future with Ruby.

A sequel is foreshadowed in the closing chapters. Ellickson writes with such daring originality, wit and energy that many readers will want to know where Ruby’s future jumps from those train portals will land her next.