Meet Courtney
Aug. 20th, 2021 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI’ve been so disappointed by the poor quality of the last two American Girl historical series (Mary Ellen and Nanea) that I put off reading the latest, Courtney Moore, the 1986 girl. But this week I broke and read Courtney Changes the Game, the first book in the duology (still bitter that AG has cut their series from six books to two, and evidently the company heeded the shrieks of anguish following the Mary Ellen books, which were printed on cheap paper with no illustrations, because Courtney is a return to form… sort of.
The books are printed on sturdier paper, and there are a few illustrations, but the vignettes look like cheap clipart and the full-page illustrations are just… photographs? They couldn’t be bothered to pay for actual illustrations; they just got actresses to play the main characters and photographed them.
It would be possible to do this in a fun, cool way, where the photographs actually add to the historical ambiance of the book. Perhaps if they were printed in a Polaroid style, for instance? But, like the vignettes, the photographs look cheap. The most obvious example is the photo of Courtney in her classroom, watching the Challenger launch… except you can absolutely tell that it’s just four kids and the teacher gathered around the television. Mattel wouldn’t even spring for half a dozen extras to make the class look like an actual class.
“But what about the story?” you ask. Well, I’m still annoyed that they’ve cut down their historical series from six books to two. This was particularly disastrous for poor Mary Ellen, because the books were clearly written for the six book format… and then squashed into two books, so that each of those two books contains three separate stories, with very little attempt to smooth the transition from one to another. You just flip to the next chapter and - suddenly it’s a different story! Bam!
This first Courtney book at least tells one complete story. And I actually did tear up during the Challenger sequence; I hadn’t realized how much time schools spent building up the Challenger launch beforehand, or that the launch had been so embedded in many lesson plans (Christa McAuliffe was going to teach a lesson from space!), so that when the Challenger exploded on live TV, many students felt like they really knew those astronauts.
The books are printed on sturdier paper, and there are a few illustrations, but the vignettes look like cheap clipart and the full-page illustrations are just… photographs? They couldn’t be bothered to pay for actual illustrations; they just got actresses to play the main characters and photographed them.
It would be possible to do this in a fun, cool way, where the photographs actually add to the historical ambiance of the book. Perhaps if they were printed in a Polaroid style, for instance? But, like the vignettes, the photographs look cheap. The most obvious example is the photo of Courtney in her classroom, watching the Challenger launch… except you can absolutely tell that it’s just four kids and the teacher gathered around the television. Mattel wouldn’t even spring for half a dozen extras to make the class look like an actual class.
“But what about the story?” you ask. Well, I’m still annoyed that they’ve cut down their historical series from six books to two. This was particularly disastrous for poor Mary Ellen, because the books were clearly written for the six book format… and then squashed into two books, so that each of those two books contains three separate stories, with very little attempt to smooth the transition from one to another. You just flip to the next chapter and - suddenly it’s a different story! Bam!
This first Courtney book at least tells one complete story. And I actually did tear up during the Challenger sequence; I hadn’t realized how much time schools spent building up the Challenger launch beforehand, or that the launch had been so embedded in many lesson plans (Christa McAuliffe was going to teach a lesson from space!), so that when the Challenger exploded on live TV, many students felt like they really knew those astronauts.
