![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book review: Girlwood
Jan. 2nd, 2012 06:14 pmClaire Dean’s Girlwood is a thin and inoffensive shadow of book that nonetheless put my back up so effectively that I’m not even sure which of its flaws I most want to illuminate.
Certainly its overweening flaw is its theme - “Just BELIEVE and everything will come out all right,” which is my LEAST FAVORITE THEME IN THE WORLD because it’s so manifestly and cruelly untrue. What? Everyone who has bad things happen to them just didn’t BELIEVE enough? And what precisely are we being entreated to BELIEVE in, anyway?
In this case, we are being invited to BELIEVE in the power of the forest, which might work better were Dean not tragically incapable of invoking a sense of the numinous. She’s clearly aiming for a sort of magical realism, a la Zilpha Keatley Snyder, where the atmosphere breathes a sense of magic even though nothing strictly impossible happens...
But for goodness' sake, she called the forest Girlwood. She clearly doesn't quite get how to make that work.
And the characters are just as bad: there's a sense that Dean just chucked character archetypes at the wall and hoped they’d stick. Our heroine Polly’s grandmother, for instance, is clearly supposed to be a wise mentor figure who teaches Polly the ways of nature and nonconformity and being unfairly hated by everyone on account of being infinitely more awesome than they are.
Polly reports - in tones that suggest that she’s reporting a cruel injustice - that the townsfolk are not super-fond of her grandmother. Forty years ago, it seems, Polly’s grandmother got the local logging works shut down, which wrecked the local economy. How dare the townsfolk be ever so slightly bitter about the fact that she destroyed their means of making a living! If only they were awesome like Polly’s grandmother and ate wild foods from the forest, then they wouldn’t need money in order to feed their families!
But at least Polly’s grandmother is interesting. Polly herself somehow manages to check off most of the items on the heroine checklist without ever developing a personality trait stronger than overweening solipsism. Self-absorption can be a fascinating character trait - but only in a character who has an interesting self to be absorbed about, and Polly is dull, dull, dull.
The only thing duller than Polly herself is her romance with her nemesis’s boyfriend. Polly’s only twelve, I would have thought surely that’s young enough to have a happy ending that doesn’t involve getting a boyfriend, but APPARENTLY NOT, so we have to wade through her perfunctory romance with a boy-shaped cut-out even more boring than Polly.
AAAAAAGH I hated this book so much.
But on the bright side, now I’m reading The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, which is awesome and kind of like I Capture the Castle. Is “books that are vaguely reminiscent of I Capture the Castle” a genre? Because it totally should be.
Certainly its overweening flaw is its theme - “Just BELIEVE and everything will come out all right,” which is my LEAST FAVORITE THEME IN THE WORLD because it’s so manifestly and cruelly untrue. What? Everyone who has bad things happen to them just didn’t BELIEVE enough? And what precisely are we being entreated to BELIEVE in, anyway?
In this case, we are being invited to BELIEVE in the power of the forest, which might work better were Dean not tragically incapable of invoking a sense of the numinous. She’s clearly aiming for a sort of magical realism, a la Zilpha Keatley Snyder, where the atmosphere breathes a sense of magic even though nothing strictly impossible happens...
But for goodness' sake, she called the forest Girlwood. She clearly doesn't quite get how to make that work.
And the characters are just as bad: there's a sense that Dean just chucked character archetypes at the wall and hoped they’d stick. Our heroine Polly’s grandmother, for instance, is clearly supposed to be a wise mentor figure who teaches Polly the ways of nature and nonconformity and being unfairly hated by everyone on account of being infinitely more awesome than they are.
Polly reports - in tones that suggest that she’s reporting a cruel injustice - that the townsfolk are not super-fond of her grandmother. Forty years ago, it seems, Polly’s grandmother got the local logging works shut down, which wrecked the local economy. How dare the townsfolk be ever so slightly bitter about the fact that she destroyed their means of making a living! If only they were awesome like Polly’s grandmother and ate wild foods from the forest, then they wouldn’t need money in order to feed their families!
But at least Polly’s grandmother is interesting. Polly herself somehow manages to check off most of the items on the heroine checklist without ever developing a personality trait stronger than overweening solipsism. Self-absorption can be a fascinating character trait - but only in a character who has an interesting self to be absorbed about, and Polly is dull, dull, dull.
The only thing duller than Polly herself is her romance with her nemesis’s boyfriend. Polly’s only twelve, I would have thought surely that’s young enough to have a happy ending that doesn’t involve getting a boyfriend, but APPARENTLY NOT, so we have to wade through her perfunctory romance with a boy-shaped cut-out even more boring than Polly.
AAAAAAGH I hated this book so much.
But on the bright side, now I’m reading The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, which is awesome and kind of like I Capture the Castle. Is “books that are vaguely reminiscent of I Capture the Castle” a genre? Because it totally should be.
