F/F Friday: Summer of Salt
Sep. 6th, 2019 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI liked the first two-thirds of Katrina Leno’s Summer of Salt a lot. The story takes place on the little island of By-the-Sea, where the Fernweh family has long lived - ever since their many-greats grandmother Annabella turned into a bird three hundred years ago, in fact. The Fernwehs have lived on the island ever since, each generation developing different magical gifts, which are appreciated by the other islanders - but never spoken of.
Quaint magical small towns are something that I like in theory, but the execution doesn’t always do it for me. But here, I thought there was the perfect balance between the quaint magical aspects and the “ugh, everyone has known me since I was a baby, and also known my mother since she was a baby” aspects; it made the town charming without being cloying.
I also really liked the main cast, which includes:
17-year-old Georgina Fernweh, who has not yet come into her power, and is afraid that she won’t before she turns eighteen, which is the cut off;
Her delightfully snarky twin sister Mary, who has been able to float since birth, but insists she’ll renounce her power if Georgina doesn’t develop a power of her own. Georgina sometimes complains that Mary is a bitch, which I find baffling. Was the snark meant to be bitchy? If yes, then boy did Leno miss the mark on that one;
Their mother, who runs an inn, which is mostly occupied by the bird-watchers who come every summer to study Annabella, who still summers at the island every year in bird form;
And Prudence (Prue), Georgina’s love interest, who would have been more compelling if she got a little more of Mary’s snark, but she does have A++ baby lesbian fashion sense so I can’t complain too much.
But then the last third happened.
In the last third of the book, Summer of Salt takes a swerve from “magically charming island community” into Rapetown. On the night that the bird Annabella is murdered, Mary stumbled back home very late, retreats to her bedroom, and barely speaks to anyone for days on end. Did she murder Annabella????
“No,” I said, because I’ve read a fucking YA book before, “she’s been raped.”
The characters caught up with me eventually, but not before I had about eighty pages to sulk about how much I hate rape as a plot twist, both in general and in this book in particular, because you promised me a quaint magical island with happy fun twin times and now you’re giving me a rape? I felt so betrayed.
I was especially annoyed because in a way the rape seemed like narrative punishment for Mary’s alleged bitchiness. Now to be fair to Leno, it’s clear that she meant it the opposite way, and by “clear” I mean “she actually spells this out in so many words”: the point is that no one deserves to be raped, no matter how bitchy they are.
But given that Mary is actually not bitchy at all - was her charming sarcasm supposed to be actually mean? You know, this may explain why I found the romance kind of lackluster: Georgina and Prue are so nice to each other that they feel anodyne, but of course they’d have to be in a world where garden-variety snark counts as “bitchiness.” So it felt like Mary was being punished or at least suffering so the author could make a point about a quality that Mary doesn’t even have, which is just adding insult to injury.
And then Mary turns into a bird. I would have gone for “Mary turns into a bird” if it had been for literally any reason other than rape trauma (actually, no, I think in general I wouldn’t have embraced turning into a bird as a trauma response, but I particularly don’t like it when the trauma is rape), but as it is it feels like a cop-out. Mary has been raped! No one has to deal with the emotional fall-out because the emotional fall-out is that she’s a bird.
Quaint magical small towns are something that I like in theory, but the execution doesn’t always do it for me. But here, I thought there was the perfect balance between the quaint magical aspects and the “ugh, everyone has known me since I was a baby, and also known my mother since she was a baby” aspects; it made the town charming without being cloying.
I also really liked the main cast, which includes:
17-year-old Georgina Fernweh, who has not yet come into her power, and is afraid that she won’t before she turns eighteen, which is the cut off;
Her delightfully snarky twin sister Mary, who has been able to float since birth, but insists she’ll renounce her power if Georgina doesn’t develop a power of her own. Georgina sometimes complains that Mary is a bitch, which I find baffling. Was the snark meant to be bitchy? If yes, then boy did Leno miss the mark on that one;
Their mother, who runs an inn, which is mostly occupied by the bird-watchers who come every summer to study Annabella, who still summers at the island every year in bird form;
And Prudence (Prue), Georgina’s love interest, who would have been more compelling if she got a little more of Mary’s snark, but she does have A++ baby lesbian fashion sense so I can’t complain too much.
But then the last third happened.
In the last third of the book, Summer of Salt takes a swerve from “magically charming island community” into Rapetown. On the night that the bird Annabella is murdered, Mary stumbled back home very late, retreats to her bedroom, and barely speaks to anyone for days on end. Did she murder Annabella????
“No,” I said, because I’ve read a fucking YA book before, “she’s been raped.”
The characters caught up with me eventually, but not before I had about eighty pages to sulk about how much I hate rape as a plot twist, both in general and in this book in particular, because you promised me a quaint magical island with happy fun twin times and now you’re giving me a rape? I felt so betrayed.
I was especially annoyed because in a way the rape seemed like narrative punishment for Mary’s alleged bitchiness. Now to be fair to Leno, it’s clear that she meant it the opposite way, and by “clear” I mean “she actually spells this out in so many words”: the point is that no one deserves to be raped, no matter how bitchy they are.
But given that Mary is actually not bitchy at all - was her charming sarcasm supposed to be actually mean? You know, this may explain why I found the romance kind of lackluster: Georgina and Prue are so nice to each other that they feel anodyne, but of course they’d have to be in a world where garden-variety snark counts as “bitchiness.” So it felt like Mary was being punished or at least suffering so the author could make a point about a quality that Mary doesn’t even have, which is just adding insult to injury.
And then Mary turns into a bird. I would have gone for “Mary turns into a bird” if it had been for literally any reason other than rape trauma (actually, no, I think in general I wouldn’t have embraced turning into a bird as a trauma response, but I particularly don’t like it when the trauma is rape), but as it is it feels like a cop-out. Mary has been raped! No one has to deal with the emotional fall-out because the emotional fall-out is that she’s a bird.
