Fault Line

Overview

Janet Tashjian, best known for the wry coming-of-age voice of The Gospel According to Larry, shifts to far more sober territory in Fault Line. Seventeen-year-old Becky Martin has a sharp comic sensibility and a stand-up career she's determined to build, but the novel's real subject is what happens when her private life stops being funny at all.

Becky's relationship with Kip Costello, an older and more established comedian on the San Francisco club circuit, begins as the kind of attention she's never had before. Tashjian traces how that attention curdles into control, and how the boundary between "he cares this much" and "he won't let me breathe" can dissolve so gradually that Becky barely notices herself crossing it.

The narrative alternates close attention between the person absorbing the abuse and the person inflicting it, refusing to let either be a simple type. The result is less a cautionary tale than a slow, uncomfortable study of how coercion actually takes hold inside a relationship that still, for a while, feels like love.

A Novel Built Around a Hard Question

What makes Fault Line distinctive within the broader shelf of YA "issue novels" is its structural choice to give the abuser interiority rather than treating him as an obstacle for the heroine to escape. Tashjian is interested in the mechanics of control — jealousy reframed as devotion, isolation reframed as intimacy — and in showing that those mechanics can operate on someone as self-possessed and funny as Becky, undercutting the assumption that only the insecure or naive get trapped this way.

The comedy-club setting does real work here too: performance and persona are already the novel's territory before the relationship turns dark, so the gap between the self Becky projects on stage and the self she becomes at home becomes the book's quiet organizing tension. Read alongside Tashjian's other work, it marks a turn from satire toward a more clinical, empathetic realism, and it's frequently discussed in the context of the broader wave of YA fiction addressing dating violence directed at teen readers.

Why Fault Line Has Been Challenged

Objections to Fault Line center on its unflinching depiction of teen dating violence, including scenes of emotional manipulation and physical abuse that some challengers consider too graphic or too disturbing for younger readers to encounter without adult guidance. Because the novel spends real time inside the perpetrator's perspective, some critics have also argued that it risks explaining or humanizing abusive behavior rather than simply condemning it, even though the book's arc is oriented toward Becky's recognition of the danger and her search for help. Broader concerns about mature content and appropriate age-level placement round out the record of objections. This title has been the subject of challenges in 2 states and 2 districts tracked in this catalog, reflecting the wider tension school and library communities face when weighing realistic portrayals of relationship abuse against concerns about protecting younger readers from disturbing material.