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Calgary author Ali Bryan explores a dystopian girls world with YA novel The Hill

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There is a fight club in Ali Bryan’s garage.

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Officially, it’s the family wrestling room. All three of her athletically gifted children — 16-year-old Pippa, 14-year-old Hugo and nine-year-old Odessa — made great use of it this past year, as has her husband. Apparently, it proved helpful in relieving lockdown stress.

“At any time, one of us or all five of us were in there wrestling, grappling, jujutsuing or just screaming into a mat,” Bryan explains. “So, yeah, it was kind of a godsend.”

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This unusual family pastime actually figures into Bryan’s newest book, an action-packed dystopian young-adult novel called The Hill. Set in the near future, most of the characters are young and scarily self-sufficient girls who live in a secluded island landfill. The group does not allow boys or men. The girls’ survival skill-set includes formal training in jujutsu, a style of Japanese martial arts that Bryan’s daughter is also well-versed in. Pippa, in fact, competed at a national level and is also a competitive wrestler. Many of the action sequences in The Hill were directly inspired by her triumphs on the mat.

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“Jujutsu is all about leverage and physics,” says Bryan, who grew up in Halifax and was a personal trainer before turning her attention to writing full time. “That’s why you can see a smaller person submit or choke a larger opponent because it’s all about leverage and finding a fulcrum and levers. My daughter was helpful in (making) sure as I was working through a fight scene I was properly transitioning from one move to another. In fact, it was probably over-written. My editor was like ‘OK, we don’t need to know exactly where on the neck her fingers are.’ ”

The Hill by Ali Bryan
The Hill by Ali Bryan jpg

Like a lot of modern young-adult literature, The Hill can be dark and violent. It has a surprisingly high body count. It’s published by New York-based Dottir Press, which specializes in edgy feminist literature. It has environmental leanings as well. The dystopian world Bryan sets it in has been ravaged by greed and overconsumption. But Bryan also had simpler goals for her first foray into YA fiction. She wanted to write an adventure story with a bunch of kick-ass young girls as its centre: Girls like her daughters, to whom Bryan dedicates the book.

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“At the time, my daughter was young and she had just started jujutsu (also known as jiu-jitsu) and she was reading,” Bryan says. “She went from the ponies, unicorns and fairy stories and jumped straight to The Hunger Games.”

Bryan was also inspired by British author Shirley Conran’s obscure 1987 novel Savages, which she read in college. It told the story of a group of women who accompany their mining executive husbands to a retreat on an island paradise and are left to their own devices in the jungle when a crazed general kills all the men.

When Bryan began writing The Hill, she wanted to explore the sort of world a group of young women would create.

“There was going to be a remake (of Lord of the Flies) recently with girls as opposed to boys being stuck on an island,” Bryan says. “A lot of people said that this absolutely would not work because a lot of what happens in Lord of the Flies was due to toxic masculinity. That was in the back of my head: What would it look like if girls were alone and coming of age without the presence of boys?”

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Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games are obvious comparisons. So is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which many consider ground zero for feminist dystopian narratives. As with those books, Bryan creates a fascinating social structure for The Hill, which is the first in what will be a trilogy. The girls live in the isolated community until they reach a certain age. It is run at a distance by a mysterious group called the Colony. The oldest girls are sent back to the mainland when their time comes. Female babies routinely arrive at the Hill, where they are assigned new mothers. All aspects of life are governed by a severe book of laws called The Manual. When we enter the story, our eyepatch-wearing protagonist Wren has become the oldest of the group and therefore its leader by default. But when one of her charges disappears, the resulting search puts her and her best friend Quinn in contact with boys for the first time. Soon, the world they know starts to unravel as they learn more about their community and its mysterious origins and face a violent invasion from the outside world.

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For fans of Bryan’s past work, The Hill is certainly a drastic departure. Her first two novels — 2013’s Roost and 2018’s The Figgs — were laugh-out-loud domestic comedies that focused on more down-to-earth concerns such as family dysfunction, child-rearing and aging. While the story arc of The Hill may seem bleak, the book is not relentlessly grim. Bryan shows off her comedic skills, particularly in the bickering between Wren and Quinn.

“Both girls are sarcastic and they are put into these situations where they are driving each other crazy,” Bryan says. “I thought it would be true to have humour and salty dialogue between them. From a structural point of view, it breaks up the intensity and the tension and the pace in a story where they are essentially fighting for their lives.”

In the end, while the book may be set in the future, she sees the characters as reflecting a certain modern sensibility.

“These are the girls I see coming up,” Bryan says. “I see girls that can fight. I see girls that can be gritty but can also still wear lipstick and throw a punch and can cry and be pissed off.”

The Hill is now in stores. Shelf Life Books will host an online launch of The Hill on March 25 at 7 p.m. Visit shelflifebooks.ca.

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