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osprey_archerWhat I've Just Finished Reading
Courtney Milan's The Heiress Effect. Jane Fairfield, desperate to drive away suitors because she needs to stay at home to protect her sister Emily from the well-meant but disastrous series of medical quacks their uncle sends to try to cure Emily's seizures, has made herself into a social monstrosity. Her gowns are too bright, her voice is too loud, and the things she says! - she sounds so kindly, so sympathetic, as she commiserates with so-and-so about how difficult it must be knowing that people only listen to him because he's a baronet.
This is the sort of premise that could easily become deeply embarrassing for the reader, who cringes as Jane lumbers from one disaster to another. But she walks into her disasters so clear-eyed and unembarrassed that it's impossible to be embarrassed for her, and it becomes rather a pleasure, instead, to watch her say the things that no one else dares to say.
The one problem I had with this book is that I felt Oliver figures out her game rather too quickly. No one else has noticed that she's being dreadful on purpose, so why should he do it in just a few meetings? It doesn't feel organic to his character (and part of the problem, I think, is that his character seems rather ill-sketched next to Jane's); it feels like it happens because it needs to happen for the narrative to move forward.
I might have liked it better if he began to fall in love with her, dreadfulness and all, and only then realized that the dreadfulness was a mask.
I also read Kelsey Osgood's How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which is half memoir about Osgood's struggle with anorexia and half indictment of the way that modern culture commodifies narratives of struggle with anorexia, a tension that Osgood is aware of and somewhat uncomfortable with and does not deal with entirely successfully. I'm not sure what a successful engagement with that conundrum would look like, but I sort of suspect it would look like not writing the book, which perhaps contributes to the fact that the book never quite comes together.
The book also suffers because Osgood is obsessed with Marya Hornbacher's Wasted, to the extent that How to Disappear Completely sometimes seems patterned on Hornbacher's memoir. At one point Osgood does a side-by-side comparison between a passage of her writing and a passage from Hornbacher's, a comparison which really drives home Osgood's comparative lack of both power and precision. (She's using it to show how she patterned her own experiences on the anorexia memoirs she devoured, so there's a good reason for it, but it still seems quite misguided.)
This is not to say that Osgood's criticisms of Wasted are wrong, of course. Osgood notes that many girls she met on eating disorders units read and reread Wasted for inspiration - not inspiration to get healthier, mind, but inspiration to redouble their commitment to being anorexic. But being right is not enough to make Osgood's book coalesce from a bunch of evocative parts into a coherent and compelling whole.
What I'm Reading Now
Rosemary Sutcliff's Lady In Waiting, about Bess Throckmorton's marriage to Walter Raleigh. The title is a pun: Bess was one on Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting, but she also (at least in Sutcliff's telling) spent much of her life waiting for Walter Raleigh to come back from his various schemes and remember her. He is, to an almost hilarious degree, the pinnacle of the Sutcliff hero who is incapable of remembering his lady-love when she's out of his sight. The queen punishes them for marrying by imprisoning them in the Tower (in separate parts of the Tower, of course), and when they're released, he doesn't even pause to say goodbye before he goes haring off to the coast.
All this is to say that it's an intensely Sutcliffian book, and if you like that sort of thing (which of course I do) you will probably enjoy it very much.
I've also started Michael Ende's Momo, but I haven't gotten very far so I'm reserving judgment currently.
What I Plan to Read Next
Still waiting for the library to come through for me with this year's Newbery books.
Courtney Milan's The Heiress Effect. Jane Fairfield, desperate to drive away suitors because she needs to stay at home to protect her sister Emily from the well-meant but disastrous series of medical quacks their uncle sends to try to cure Emily's seizures, has made herself into a social monstrosity. Her gowns are too bright, her voice is too loud, and the things she says! - she sounds so kindly, so sympathetic, as she commiserates with so-and-so about how difficult it must be knowing that people only listen to him because he's a baronet.
This is the sort of premise that could easily become deeply embarrassing for the reader, who cringes as Jane lumbers from one disaster to another. But she walks into her disasters so clear-eyed and unembarrassed that it's impossible to be embarrassed for her, and it becomes rather a pleasure, instead, to watch her say the things that no one else dares to say.
The one problem I had with this book is that I felt Oliver figures out her game rather too quickly. No one else has noticed that she's being dreadful on purpose, so why should he do it in just a few meetings? It doesn't feel organic to his character (and part of the problem, I think, is that his character seems rather ill-sketched next to Jane's); it feels like it happens because it needs to happen for the narrative to move forward.
I might have liked it better if he began to fall in love with her, dreadfulness and all, and only then realized that the dreadfulness was a mask.
I also read Kelsey Osgood's How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which is half memoir about Osgood's struggle with anorexia and half indictment of the way that modern culture commodifies narratives of struggle with anorexia, a tension that Osgood is aware of and somewhat uncomfortable with and does not deal with entirely successfully. I'm not sure what a successful engagement with that conundrum would look like, but I sort of suspect it would look like not writing the book, which perhaps contributes to the fact that the book never quite comes together.
The book also suffers because Osgood is obsessed with Marya Hornbacher's Wasted, to the extent that How to Disappear Completely sometimes seems patterned on Hornbacher's memoir. At one point Osgood does a side-by-side comparison between a passage of her writing and a passage from Hornbacher's, a comparison which really drives home Osgood's comparative lack of both power and precision. (She's using it to show how she patterned her own experiences on the anorexia memoirs she devoured, so there's a good reason for it, but it still seems quite misguided.)
This is not to say that Osgood's criticisms of Wasted are wrong, of course. Osgood notes that many girls she met on eating disorders units read and reread Wasted for inspiration - not inspiration to get healthier, mind, but inspiration to redouble their commitment to being anorexic. But being right is not enough to make Osgood's book coalesce from a bunch of evocative parts into a coherent and compelling whole.
What I'm Reading Now
Rosemary Sutcliff's Lady In Waiting, about Bess Throckmorton's marriage to Walter Raleigh. The title is a pun: Bess was one on Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting, but she also (at least in Sutcliff's telling) spent much of her life waiting for Walter Raleigh to come back from his various schemes and remember her. He is, to an almost hilarious degree, the pinnacle of the Sutcliff hero who is incapable of remembering his lady-love when she's out of his sight. The queen punishes them for marrying by imprisoning them in the Tower (in separate parts of the Tower, of course), and when they're released, he doesn't even pause to say goodbye before he goes haring off to the coast.
All this is to say that it's an intensely Sutcliffian book, and if you like that sort of thing (which of course I do) you will probably enjoy it very much.
I've also started Michael Ende's Momo, but I haven't gotten very far so I'm reserving judgment currently.
What I Plan to Read Next
Still waiting for the library to come through for me with this year's Newbery books.
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no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 01:29 am (UTC)Momo does have its precious side. How you feel about it will probably depend on whether you feel the underlying story was able to shine bright enough to not-mind the preciousness.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 08:23 am (UTC)(that's it, except for robert, who's a shiny woobie of my heart :D)
no subject
Date: 2015-02-26 03:07 pm (UTC)