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osprey_archerIn 2005, my family went on a three week trip to Australia and New Zealand, on which I embarked determined to bring back gems of antipodal literature.
Unfortunately, I was not very internet savvy at that point, so I didn’t successfully manage to search for the titles of these gems. Presumably I could have asked the booksellers, but this literally didn’t occur to me until I was writing this post, so clearly that was a non-starter.
So mostly I purchased the complete works of Isobelle Carmody, plus some of Lynley Dodd’s Slinki Malinki books (happy to report that my niece now enjoys them). But I did consider Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This?, before concluding that this book would obviously make it to the United States before long.
I was correct! The book made it to the United States within a year or two after that trip. I proceeded not to read it for another twenty years.
But finally I have read it. At this point it’s kind of a period piece of my own youth. CDs! DVDs! Young people who use their cell phones to actually call each other! Be still my beating heart.
But also, the character who is so relentlessly fat-shamed by her mother and her classmates that she informs our heroine that she wishes she could become anorexic. Unable to achieve this fatal disease, she instead takes up smoking. She ultimately gives it up when she gets a boyfriend who likes her curves, but still. Oh, 2005, how I don’t miss you. What an awful year. Awful decade in fact. Sometimes I feel like an old curmudgeon shaking my metaphorical cane at The State of the World These Days, so it’s cheering in a way to be reminded that I hated the world when I was a teenager, too.
“But Aster,” you complain. “The actual book? Do you have any thoughts about Does My Head Look Big in This?”
Well, to be honest, the book also reminded me that I had a tortured relationship with contemporary YA even before its Twilightification. It also seemed to me that the move from children’s literature to YA echoed the arc of Fern’s character growth in Charlotte’s Web: at the start she saves Wilbur the runt pig and spends hours listening to the talking animals, but at the end all she cares about is some stupid boy who took her for a ride on the Ferris wheel. It’s a shift from wonder and possibility and talking animals to boring romance and clothes and makeup (or boring sports if the main character is a boy).
As an adult I have more tolerance for this sort of thing, but I suspect that in my youth I would have been horrified that our heroine starts wearing the hijab full-time and still spends most of her time thinking about clothes and makeup and boys. To my seventeen-year-old mind, the chief benefit of wearing the hijab would be never having to think about any of those things ever again! Or at least until you’re ready to get married. (I recognize that this is not how it actually works, but it’s still what I would have thought.)
So in fact it’s a good thing that I waited 20 years to read the book, because I probably would not have much appreciated the book in 2005. But in 2026, it’s given me a nice wander down memory lane.
Unfortunately, I was not very internet savvy at that point, so I didn’t successfully manage to search for the titles of these gems. Presumably I could have asked the booksellers, but this literally didn’t occur to me until I was writing this post, so clearly that was a non-starter.
So mostly I purchased the complete works of Isobelle Carmody, plus some of Lynley Dodd’s Slinki Malinki books (happy to report that my niece now enjoys them). But I did consider Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This?, before concluding that this book would obviously make it to the United States before long.
I was correct! The book made it to the United States within a year or two after that trip. I proceeded not to read it for another twenty years.
But finally I have read it. At this point it’s kind of a period piece of my own youth. CDs! DVDs! Young people who use their cell phones to actually call each other! Be still my beating heart.
But also, the character who is so relentlessly fat-shamed by her mother and her classmates that she informs our heroine that she wishes she could become anorexic. Unable to achieve this fatal disease, she instead takes up smoking. She ultimately gives it up when she gets a boyfriend who likes her curves, but still. Oh, 2005, how I don’t miss you. What an awful year. Awful decade in fact. Sometimes I feel like an old curmudgeon shaking my metaphorical cane at The State of the World These Days, so it’s cheering in a way to be reminded that I hated the world when I was a teenager, too.
“But Aster,” you complain. “The actual book? Do you have any thoughts about Does My Head Look Big in This?”
Well, to be honest, the book also reminded me that I had a tortured relationship with contemporary YA even before its Twilightification. It also seemed to me that the move from children’s literature to YA echoed the arc of Fern’s character growth in Charlotte’s Web: at the start she saves Wilbur the runt pig and spends hours listening to the talking animals, but at the end all she cares about is some stupid boy who took her for a ride on the Ferris wheel. It’s a shift from wonder and possibility and talking animals to boring romance and clothes and makeup (or boring sports if the main character is a boy).
As an adult I have more tolerance for this sort of thing, but I suspect that in my youth I would have been horrified that our heroine starts wearing the hijab full-time and still spends most of her time thinking about clothes and makeup and boys. To my seventeen-year-old mind, the chief benefit of wearing the hijab would be never having to think about any of those things ever again! Or at least until you’re ready to get married. (I recognize that this is not how it actually works, but it’s still what I would have thought.)
So in fact it’s a good thing that I waited 20 years to read the book, because I probably would not have much appreciated the book in 2005. But in 2026, it’s given me a nice wander down memory lane.
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Date: 2026-02-10 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-10 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-10 08:46 pm (UTC)I do like Slinki Malinki and could probably recite large chunks of both the first one and Open the Door thanks to reading them many, many times to my kids.
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Date: 2026-02-10 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-10 10:45 pm (UTC)It's funny that you mention this, because I was just recently musing that while I am absolutely appalled by the 2016 nostalgia trend (did we not all have a terrible time in 2016? no?? just me???), I am not immune to the 2005-06 nostalgia of all the pop culture things that turned/are turning 20 last/this year. But... yeah, it probably helps that I discovered most of them post-2005/06, on account of having been ten.
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Date: 2026-02-10 10:59 pm (UTC)/crawls back under rock
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Date: 2026-02-10 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-12 01:30 pm (UTC)Someday I should write a post about my Theory of Nostalgia, which is that people can be nostalgic for any time when they personally felt socially connected, or any time that they can plausibly convince themselves that WOULD have felt more connected, even if objectively that time might be pretty bad. Hence the phenomenon of (a) former gulag prisoners waxing nostalgic about the gulag because the friendships there were so strong, and (b) the general phenomenon of World War II nostalgia.
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Date: 2026-02-10 10:58 pm (UTC)I suspect that in my youth I would have been horrified that our heroine starts wearing the hijab full-time and still spends most of her time thinking about clothes and makeup and boys. To my seventeen-year-old mind, the chief benefit of wearing the hijab would be never having to think about any of those things ever again! Or at least until you’re ready to get married. (I recognize that this is not how it actually works, but it’s still what I would have thought.)
I share your history of ignorance on this front. I remember when I first moved to a Muslim enclave for a while, I was surprised to see hair salons specifically catering to hijabi women. It just hadn't crossed my white girl mind that beneath the headscarves - which they take off at home, duh - hijabis have much the same grooming needs and preferences as their bare-headed sisters. Even niqabi women, in my area at least, usually seem to have eyeliner game that I with my shaky hands can only dream of.
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Date: 2026-02-12 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-12 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-12 04:34 pm (UTC)