Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Tell the Wind and Fire, a 2016 retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities which is quite enjoyable within the confines of its genre, which genre is modern YA. Therefore, Lucie Manette and her boyfriend Ethan and her boyfriend’s magical doppelganger Carwyn (a soulless double created when Ethan’s extremely wealthy and powerful family used a Dark spell to save him from death) are not merely more-or-less ordinary people caught up in a revolution. They are at the absolute center of the Revolution in which Dark New York (Brooklyn) rises up against Light New York (Manhattan).

Are all cities now divided into Light and Dark? Do other cities, in fact, exist, and if they do, do they have an opinion on this whole revolution thing? Reader, you are asking the wrong questions. The right question is “Do any of us really truly ship Lucie with Ethan when Carwyn is right there lounging in doorways being handsome and oppressed and full of quips?” (Perhaps also “Does Carwyn have a soul?”, but you’ve read modern YA. You already know the answer is “yes.”)

What I’m Reading Now

This week in Villette, Lucy Snowe acts as Ginevra’s lover in a play, then spends the long vacation all but alone in the abandoned school. Her already disordered nerves quickly take a nosedive into crushing melancholia, which ends with Protestant Lucy going to confession because if she doesn’t speak to another human being of her suffering she might just die.

I realize that many modern readers struggle with Lucy’s attitude toward Catholicism in this book, but I think if you mentally replace Catholics with the religious group you personally consider most wrongheaded - Southern Baptists, perhaps, or Mormons - you get a sense of the desperation that forced Lucy to this step, and the largeness of soul required for her to comment afterward (and notwithstanding that his response to her confession was “these impressions under which you are smarting are messengers from God to bring you back to the true Church”), “He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May Heaven bless him!”

What I Plan to Read Next

After Thanksgiving passes, I’ve got a slate of Christmas books planned. Particularly excited for Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal and a couple of Christmas-themed books of Susan Cooper’s.

Comments

[cyphomandra]

Yeah the confines of YA made Tell The Wind and Fire not that successful for me - I liked Lucie navigating her shift from childhood icon to adult woman, but I like my Sydney Carton expys much more self destructive and much less quippy bad boys (which might just be me!).

I really want to reread Villette but I have so many other things I am supposed to be working on…

[osprey_archer]

"A Tale of Two Cities but as a modern YA novel" is one of those things that is impressive to accomplish, but also when you look at the final result, maybe not worth accomplishing? Modern YA (as of 2016; not sure how the genre has evolved since) may just not be able to accommodate it.

[kore]

I love Lucy and Ginevra. "I know not why I let her drink from my cup...." Yes you do Lucy.

[asakiyume]

LOL, love this comment (and I say this with no other familiarity with Villette than Osprey Archer's posts.

[osprey_archer]

Lucy is such an interesting blend of crushingly forthright and terribly dishonest, with herself as much as the rest of us. I just got to the part where she's answering Graham's first letter and there's a lengthy parenthetical about how she DEFINITELY didn't entertain "warm feelings" for him, sandwiched in the middle of a lengthy paragraph in which she describes exactly how warm her feelings were. Lucy! Who are you fooling!

[asakiyume]

“Do any of us really truly ship Lucie with Ethan when Carwyn is right there lounging in doorways being handsome and oppressed and full of quips?” (Perhaps also “Does Carwyn have a soul?”, but you’ve read modern YA. You already know the answer is “yes.”) --LOL. I think it would be interesting to look at the balance of good boy/bad boy characteristics, and what ones make readers (some generic category of readers) choose one over the other. Because you're definitely right: the good boy is often the stick in the mud whom the girl rejects for the more interesting bad boy.... buuuut not always! Or sometimes not for all readers! So what makes the difference there? What makes a stick in the mud less of a stick in the mud. Et cetera.

[osprey_archer]

Ethan is not a stick in the mud, but he simply cannot compete with Carwyn being all Dark and Oppressed and Lounging. Maybe if he quipped too? Maybe if there were even briefly some suggestion that he might sacrifice himself for Carwyn instead of the other way around? Part of the problem with knowing that you're reading a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities is that you KNOW you're getting that sacrifice at the end - it can't have the surprise of Sydney Carton's sacrifice to a new reader of A Tale of Two Cities.