A Certain Slant of Light

Although this series of posts is entitled 100 Books That Influenced Me, some of the posts are definitely a bit sketchy on the whole question of influence. (In fact, you can really see a progression in my book review skills over the course of this series.) I don’t think it’s that the books in question didn’t influence me, but that I sometimes struggled to articulate just what influence, for instance, The Perilous Gard exerted on me.

(In retrospect, of course, Kate and Christopher’s romance-through-bickering was formative, as was the book’s picture of the fairy folk – the alienness of the fairy folk, even though in The Perilous Gard the fairy folk are in fact human.)

However, there is nothing difficult to define about the influence of Elaine Corn’s Now You’re Cooking: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know to Start Cooking Today. I read it as a baby cook, sighing over the vision of independence implied by the book’s assumption that one had one’s own pantry, which one needed to stock, and many of the habits it suggested became my own. In particular, Corn advocates that cleaning up as you go, so that there are only a few dirty dishes at the end of the meal rather than a dispiriting mountain. So helpful.

But I didn’t just pick up a few specific tips: the book affected my attitudes more generally. “Instead of cooking, it seems we’re filtering the essence out of our food in an attempt to save time, fat, and calories,” Corn muses, and throughout the book, she gently but insistently returns to the theme that your ultimate aim in cooking is to make something that you would like to eat, even if that demands five extra minutes and a tablespoon of butter.

“I use salt. I use butter. I use cream. Olive oil shows up. So do eggs,” Corn says, breezily invoking all the nutritional bogeymen of 1994. I found this attitude deliciously bracing, and although the bogeymen have changed since then (are carbs still evil, or have we moved on from that too?), the basic insouciance has held me in good stead. Fat is not evil, carbs are not evil, food is not your enemy. Go into the kitchen and make a mess (and clean it up as you go!) and make something. If you start with good ingredients that you like, probably you’ll end up with something tasty. Dig in!

Lo these many years ago, I signed up for a challenge to write a hundred posts about a topic of my choice – in my case, 100 Books That Influenced Me. After limping, years later, to the halfway mark, I decided that 50 Books That Influenced Me would simply have to be enough and called it a day.

Well, I’ve decided to try to finish the challenge after all, a decision brought to you by the fact that I spend much of yesterday evening removing every box of books from my closet – a side note here; I just moved in, I’m likely to be moving again in a few months, and I made an executive decision not to unpack all my books.

But here I was, taking out the boxes, (the cats kept climbing on the exact next box that I needed, of course), opening each box and checking its contents, until at the very bottom of the very last box in the bottom left hand corner of the closet, I found the book I’d been looking for: Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.

Adler’s writing has as much economy and grace as her cooking. A lot of twenty-first century books are shaped, inevitably, by the way that one writes on the internet: short and pithy, not too many sentences in a paragraph, anything to avoid big blocks of text. Although An Everlasting Meal was published in 2011, the book feels somehow unmoored from time, old-fashioned in the best way, with the clarity and flow of the best mid-twentieth century essayists. Adler’s sentences expand and breathe.

“It is as wise to be prepared for an impractical meal as for a practical one. If something so good or so bad has happened that only buttered toast and cuttlefish, or delicately whipped liver, or goose neck, or pate are appropriate, as long as you keep your pantry stocked with a few lovely, uncommon things, you can open it and be as well set up to celebrate as to survive.”

The Everlasting Meal of the title is what you might call a theory of kitchen management: of seeing in yesterday’s leftovers the seed for today’s meal, and in today’s leftovers the beginning for tomorrow’s, and so forth, so that a bit of stale bread becomes breadcrumbs that you sprinkle on a pasta dish, and the leftovers get made into a pasta frittata, and the last of the pasta frittata becomes the filling for a sandwich, cut from a loaf which will, in time, yield more stale bread…

This is cooking as a rhythm, a braid, an ongoing practice where each meal feeds into the next. “I have always found that recipes make food preparation staccato,” Adler muses, and “cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page.” Leftovers are not served again as a mere lesser version of their earlier selves, but viewed as ingredients that will become delicious again as they are incorporated into the next meal. And the age of those ingredients, “lovingly neglected by skilled hands,” will make that meal better than if all the ingredients had come to it shiny and new.

This attitude suffuses the book. Soups and stews, Adler notes, don’t come into their own till the second day. “Pots of beans have an admirable, long-term perspective on eating. It’s the same to them whether you eat them tonight or in three days. Beans get better over a few days’ sitting, gorged and swelled…” There is an entire chapter of recipes for stale bread. “(Thank heavens for the occasional, calculable superiority of old things)”, Adler writes, in a parenthetical note on the superiority of day-old rice for fried rice.

Adler has a gift for these parenthetical notes. “(No rules apply to beets. Beets have their own way of cooking and their own way of being.)” This is not merely a method of cooking, but a way of being in the world: an ethic of paying close attention, and working with what you have. And if what you have is beets, you bend to the beet way.

I must confess that the first time I read this book, back around when it came out, it was utterly beyond me. It felt impossible to manage my kitchen in this way. And did I really want to? Adler uses so many vegetables. Sure, she makes them sound delicious, but that just made me suspicious. And the more poetical passages struck me as suspicious, too. Beets have their own way of being? What does that mean?

So I gave the book away. Then a few years later I asked for another copy for Christmas, and read it again, and began to try; and then for various reasons gave it up in late 2021. But now that I’ve got my own kitchen, I’m ready to try again.

Writing about Wild Magic last week reminded me of my very favorite book in the Wild Mage quartet, possibly my favorite Pierce book overall (although my favorite series is Protector of the Small): Emperor Mage, in which Daine is part of a diplomatic envoy to Tortall’s frenemy Carthak, and ends up releasing a dinosaur army on the palace when she believes that the eponymous Emperor Mage Ozorne has executed her teacher Numair, who was Ozorne’s erstwhile best friend, until Ozorne exiled him from Carthak and then Numair got all buddy-buddy with Tortall.

Other highlights include:

Ozorne’s aviary. The birds are great, and I also love the scene where Ozorne creates a little illusion Numair and squashes it. OZORNE YOU DRAMA QUEEN.

Lindhall Reed and his delightful animal habitats.

Daine’s tiny monkey friend Zekoi. In general Daine’s animal sidekicks - indeed, the animal sidekicks throughout Pierce’s novels are A++.

I could go on enumerating the many beauties of Emperor Mage. However, these posts are at least theoretically about how these books influenced me, and in the case of Emperor Mage this comes down to one character: Varice Kingsford, Ozorne’s party planner and Numair’s ex-girlfriend.

Now if you were exposed at all to American pop culture in the 1990s, then you could see right away that Varice fits a certain type: she’s the curvaceous girly blonde who has sex appeal and knows how to use it, and even as a fifth grader I knew that a character who has feminine wiles and uses them is usually Bad. Sometimes there’s an exception for the main character - if she flirts, she may be taking control of her sexuality in a 90s girl power kind of way - but flirty secondary characters: Bad.

(You can actually see this dynamic in Pierce’s earlier Song of the Lioness quartet. When Alanna sleeps with Prince Jon, she’s making a feminist statement by deciding not to save her virginity till marriage. But Jon’s other lovers, the beautiful blondes Josiane and Delia, end up as part of the conspiracy against his throne.)

So you could have knocked me over with a feather when it turns out that Varice is not, in fact, in league with all of Ozorne’s most evil plans. She has all these qualities that often stood in for female badness in pop culture at the time, and yet she is not, in fact, a bad person at all! It blew my tiny eleven-year-old mind.

I don’t remember where precisely we bought Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Headless Cupid, or exactly how old I was at the time; but I remember that it was on sale on a special rack, and it was summer and sunny and I sat in the car and read.

Or maybe I just remember it as sunny and summery because the book itself takes place in summer, although not always in the sun - although there is one scene, where David and his new stepsister Amanda go to gather herbs, and there’s a sense almost of heat shimmering off the page as they go down the dusty lane to the crossroads, for herbs gathered at the crossroads will have more occult powers.

In a sense The Headless Cupid is most important to me because it led me to Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s other works: The Egypt Game and the Greensky books (the ending of the second Greensky book is one of the most sublime endings I’ve ever read) and especially The Changeling.

But it’s also important to me for its own sake: it has a permanent place on the shelves in my bedside table. You can read The Headless Cupid (and I did, as a child) as simply a cracking good story. I loved the occult themes, which start in the realm of make-believe and edge toward reality - yet becoming more mysterious and numinous the more real they become.

(To me the balance of the evidence suggests that there is an actual ghost, although it’s not totally definite.)

Snyder is excellent at portraying the way that children play, particularly the way that they like to play with magic. The sequences of tests that Amanda prepares for the Stanley children before she’s willing to initiate them into the world of the occult is great: a day where they can’t touch metal, a day when they’re not allowed to touch hardwood floor (an early version of “the floor is lava!”), a day of silence…

As a child, I reacted to Amanda much the way that David does: he’s fascinated by her, and he goes along with her initiation tests because they’re interesting and he’s hoping they’ll help him understand her better - but he doesn’t understand her. Yet her actions always had an internal logic, and even when I didn’t understand what it was, I always felt that it was there - that Snyder was playing fair.

Rereading as an adult, it’s much clearer to me that Amanda is lashing out because she’s angry about her parents’ divorce (which David’s dad does mention to David, but he doesn’t beleaguer the point), and why that would seep into areas of her life that didn’t (to a child’s mind) seem particularly connected.

Lots of Snyder’s books have this subterranean layer - often more than one subterranean layer. They give her work a sense of depth that I could feel even as a child and which means that they almost always reward rereading - and yet the stories work even if you don’t understand that they’re not just about poltergeists & friendship but also divorce, or child abuse, or lonely children.

(The one exception IMO is The Witches of Worm, which I neither liked nor understood as a child - I think you have to see and understand the underpinnings in that story in order to find Jessica sympathetic. But that may just have been me. If anyone else read it - what did you think?)

And, of course, I have to mention the illustrations. A lot of Snyder’s books were illustrated by Alton Raible (particularly in the sixties and seventies, her golden years, although some of her later books are very good too), and it’s hard to imagine a more felicitous marriage of author and illustrator. Although now I’m thinking: The Perilous Gard and Richard Cuffari, Beth and Joe Krush and their illustrations for The Borrowers and Gone-Away Lake...

It’s a little disturbing how many of my favorite books also have my favorite illustrations. Maybe I’m simply too susceptible to the lure of a good picture.

Nonetheless. Alton Raible’s pictures always seemed to me perfectly in harmony with the atmosphere of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s books - that delicate blend of magic and realism. Who could beat his picture of Amanda slipping down the dark hallway like a ghost, the picture all dark but for the reflected gleam of her flashlight?

I can’t believe that I haven’t written about Little House in the Big Woods before: it really ought to be near the top of any list of 100 Books that Influenced Me. Maybe I was having trouble picking which Little House book to write about, because I also adored The Long Winter (the hardship! The cold! The never-ending snow! The kindling twisted out of straw and the wheat ground into flour in the coffee mill!) and over time Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years have grown on me…

I loved what you might call the how-to aspect of the book - because a large part of the narrative is just description after description of how to do things: make butter or smoke meat or make shiny little bullets that burn a little girl’s fingers when she can’t resist touching them. It appeals to the same part of me that loved to sit and watched the bobbin lace maker at GlobalFest for ages: there’s just something wonderful about watching or reading about people making things, especially things that require great skill.

But Little House in the Big Woods remains my favorite. It’s one of the most perfect evocations of the experience of being a five-year-old that’s ever been written; I say this on the authority of having first heard the book when I was four or five and identifying so intensely with Laura that I called my self-insert characters Laura for years afterward.

And the food descriptions! My God, the food! The attic full of pumpkins, the butter colored with carrots (and Laura and Mary snarfing down the milk-soaked grated carrots as a treat: truly a different time), the smokehouse made out of an old hollow leg fed with hickory chips, that releases the faint enticing smell of smoking venison around the house. The entire pig-butchering sequence, with the head cheese, and Laura and Mary cooking the pig’s tail in the open stove. The sugaring off.

The scene where the sugar waxes and the children get to pour it into the snow and it hardens instantly into candy and they can eat as much as they want was basically my ultimate dream of happiness when I was a small child. The whole book gives me the same cozy feeling expressed in the ending of the novel, when Laura lies in her trundle bed and thinks to herself:

“This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Eloise Jarvis McGraw's The Moorchild is dedicated "To all children who have ever felt different." I don't believe I read this dedication the first time round - I was not in the habit of reading dedications when I was eleven - and it is perhaps just as well, because I already identified with the book so hard that I might very well have picked it as my desert island book if anyone had asked me at the time.

At the center of this of course is Saaski herself, the moorchild of the title: a member of the fairy Folk who is exchanged for a human child because she's half-human herself, and therefore can never fit in the Mound. And yet she doesn't fit with the humans either, with her dark skin and dandelion fluff of hair and overlong fingers (I latched onto this finger detail so hard that I gave it to my OC at the time) and her habit of forever running away to the Moors. "Freaky odd," the village children call her, and her only friend is the tinker's boy Tam, who comes sometimes to the moors with his pipes.

Saaski's journey to find - not a place she belongs, but a person she belongs with - resonated with me terribly. The book still hits me emotionally when I reread it now. I'm even more conscious of the pervasive sense of loneliness in this book: not just Saaski's but Tam's, Old Bess's, even Saaski's parents Anwara and Yanno, who love their child but can't understand her.

But I have enough distance from it now to admire the beautiful craft of the book too, not least of which is the marvelous grasp of historical detail. Saaski's daily chores (milking the cow, setting the bread), and the yearly chores of a small village farm - swarming the bees, retting the flax - are woven into the narrative with perfect naturalness, as are the thick swarms of herb names that dance across the narrative as Saaski brings them to her grandmother, Old Bess.

I loved (and still love) Old Bess almost as much as Saaski: a tough, tart-tongued village healer, who holds her peace and keeps her counsel and watches over Saaski, and loves her even though she knows from the start that Saaski is a changeling child - perhaps because she sees something of herself in Saaski. Old Bess is not one of the Folk herself (in fact, the Folk have written runes on her door to warn each other of danger: even they know Old Bess is a force to be reckoned with!), but she's an outsider too, and yet has built up a life in the village despite that.

There's also a lot of beautiful, beautiful description in this book, as vivid and absolutely unobtrusive as the historical detail: the simple images of the moor as "broom-gilded" (broom being a yellow flower), or the scene where Saaski and her one friend Tam play their pipes together and Saaski's bagpipes sing "over and under his little pipe's shrill melody like a bramble vine twining a sapling."

And the metaphors McGraw uses to describe mental states, too, are beautiful vivid and apt. After a bad start to the day, Saaski rushes up to the moors to "let the music mend the jagged edges of the morning"; or Saaski's struggles with her mostly-submerged memories of her time with the Folk, which she strives to push away and yet sometimes yearns to remember, so that when someone mentions a familiar name, it "streaked across her memory like a shooting star and vanished into the general dark."

God, what I would give to write a metaphor like that. There are a lot of books I admire without wanting to have written them, but this one - I would give anything to write a story that means as much for other people as this has meant for me.

In lieu of the Wednesday reading meme (because I accomplished basically no reading this past week, except a reread of Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary), I'm going to answer lycoris's December meme question: Tell me about your favourite book that you think I might not have heard of.

I actually have a tag that is partially devoted to this question: one of the things I used the 100 books tag for is to write reviews of tragically overlooked books that no one else knows even though I love them. Past reviews in this category include The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, Nekomah Creek, Mummy, and Becoming Rosemary.

But this time I'm going to write about Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, because I did just reread it and because I think it's an absolute tragedy that I didn't hear about it to read it earlier. I don't know that I would have loved it more - I don't think it's a book you need to read at a certain age to love - but I would have loved having it as part of the leafmold of my mind when I was a teenager.

What I love about this book - one of the things I love about this book - is that it's so wide-ranging in its interests. The main characters talk about science and religion (and how science and religion fit together, or don't), feminism, philosophy, vocations, the meaning of friendship and the permutations of friendship, and the way that families work or don't work, and books and literature. This takes up a huge amount of the book: it's all urgently important to Gentian and her friends, and therefore provides the main plot of the book.

For instance, there are couple sections where the narrative absolutely stops while Gentian reads an act of Julius Caesar with her family. I feel like this is doing some sort of thematic work, the way that the Hamlet performance does thematic work in Dean's Tam Lin, but I'm not sure what it is and it's possible that Dean was just like "I feel like talking about Shakespeare."

This is not, suffice it to say, a book with a strongly propulsive plot. In fact, calling the story meandering doesn't really do justice to the way that their conversations loop back on themselves, covering the same ground from different angles, and then shooting off in new and strange directions.

I have heard Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary criticized because Gentian and her friends seem unrealistically precocious, and there is perhaps something to this - they're not only very bright, but also extraordinarily well read and capable of having precise and philosophically sophisticated arguments - but IMO it misses the point. That's not something that would have bothered me if I had read the book as a teenager, any more than it bothered me in Tamora Pierce's First Test that fifteen-year-old Neal apparently found a bunch of ten-year-olds completely suitable companions.

The other problem with the book is that the ending doesn't really come together (I wrote about this at greater length in my original review); endings don't generally seem to be Dean's strong suit - Tam Lin's ending seemed quite abrupt to me. But the book is a dialogue as much as a novel; it's interesting because of the explorations it takes through issues, and those explorations are not discounted because none of them tie up nicely at the end.

***

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary has also led to some musing on my part about friendship novels - that is, novels where the friendship is the force that pushes the narrative, the way a romance pushes a romance novel, rather than novels where the friendship is important but the actual plot comes from something else (like The Eagle of the Ninth, say, where Marcus and Esca's friendship is absolutely integral but the story comes from the search for the eagle).

I think it's rather hard to structure a book around a friendship, because unlike a romance,
a friendship doesn't usually have an arc: there isn't a moment of consummation. It chugs along steadily unless things go south, and even the going south is often not dramatic. Drift kills friendship as much as anything else.

Perhaps having a non-standard structure is an important part of telling friendship stories? Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, my touchstone book about friendship, also has a distinctive structure. I must think about this.

My freshman year of college, I took an immeasurably dull class about the History of the Middle East: the kind of class where I could have read the textbook and achieved more entertainment and information retention. It was worth it, however, because one of the books we read was Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village.

Despite the title, Fernea’s book is really a memoir more than an ethnography. In fact, before it is anything else, a delightful and well-written fish out of water story: in the 1950s, Fernea spent the first two years of her marriage accompanying her husband on his research trip in El Nahra, a village in Iraq, even though neither of them spoke much Arabic at the beginning.

Fernea finds it hard to adjust. Although she's in El Nahra with her husband, their social lives are quite separate, and her limited Arabic makes her seem weird and kind of hilarious to the local women. “They did not find me sympathetic or interesting or even human, but only amusing as a performing member of another species. I tried to feel tragic, superior, ironic, above it all - but failed utterly and wept again.”

Fernea's breakdown when she realizes how utterly she has failed to connect with the local women is the great crisis of the memoir. As her Arabic gets better and one of the local girls becomes her best friend and her sponsor, Fernea becomes a small part of an interlocking web of women in El Nahra.

One of the reasons the book stays with me so strongly, I think, is that it is one of the first nonfiction books I read where relationships between women - the relationships of mothers and daughters, sisters, friends, co-wives, teachers and their pupils at the local girls' school - are central to the book. They are peripherally involved at best in the great movements of history. But for Fernea, they're important and interesting because they are there: their existence is justification enough.

The other reason the book has stayed with me is because it remains one of the best models I have read for writing about difference. How do you write about people from a culture very different than your own without making them seem totally alien - or, conversely, without eliding the differences in order to make the foreign seem to be just like us?

The book's great strength lies ultimately in its modesty. Fernea makes no sweeping statements about the nature of Iraq or Islam or the relationship between East and West; she simply writes about her experiences as a young woman spending the first two years of her married life in El Nahra with her husband.

Don't make sweeping generalizations, and don't make the people you meet into mere examplars of your generalizations. They are not just Representative #1 through 10 of the local culture; they are individuals with individual personalities. Tell specific stories about specific people, and let patterns emerge from that. Admit it when you don't understand something rather than speculating fancifully about what it might mean. And don't pass judgment.

Near the end of the book, Fernea writes of a conversation she had with her husband not long before they left Iraq. “We admitted to each other that we had both had somewhat irrational and idealistic notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had not basically changed anyone’s attitude, except perhaps our own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have hoped for, and perhaps it was enough.”

Bill Bryson was once my secret authorial love. I adore his books and await each new one eagerly, but until this year I didn’t have anyone to share them with. This year, however! This year, I lent Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself to Emma, who lent it to Rick, who lent it to Caitlin, who lent it to her mother, at which circuitous point the book wended its way back to me, with a clamor from all parties to borrow the rest of my Bill Bryson books.

Many of Bryson’s books are travelogues (I’m awfully fond of In a Sunburned Country, his book about Australia). I’m a Stranger Here Myself is a bit different: it’s a collection of, I believe, newspaper articles that Bryson wrote after he returned to the United States after twenty years in England.

One of the things I’m a Stranger Here Myself captures is the differences between places: not just big obvious differences, but the little ones that accrue and, cumulatively, create those big differences between places. And between times, as well; Bryson writes not only about the differences between the US and England, but between the US in the 1970s and the US in the 1990s.

These are themes that have been important in my own writing. I wouldn’t swear that I’m a Stranger Here Myself is the first place I read about them, but it’s the first book I read that held this up to the light and said, “Hey, you guys, this is interesting.”

But I’m a Stranger Here Myself had an even more basic impact on me than that. It was the first non-fiction book I read that showed me that nonfiction could actually be good: not only could it tell you interesting information, but it could be fun to read at the same time, as well. And not just fun, but funny! Many of his early books, in particular, are right up there with Terry Pratchett, Mindy Kaling, and Sarah Vowell.

For years after I read Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, I liked to drop small change on the ground in emulation of the heroine. Stargirl is always doing little acts of kindness: she drops change, leaves anonymous cards, keeps all her trimmed hair for birds to make nests with. Whenever one her classmates has a birthday, she sings “Happy birthday” to them on her ukelele in the crowded lunchroom.

Aside from dropping change, I haven’t copied most of Stargirl’s specific actions (certainly not the ukelele interludes!) but it’s hard to overstate how much impact the Stargirl approach had on my conception of “nice things to do.” One of the reasons the note in Untold charmed me so much is that it seemed like very Stargirl.

But rereading Stargirl this break, what strikes me is how hands-off Stargirl’s approach is. All her kindness is anonymous and from a distance. The narrator, Leo, considers this a sign of her saintliness, the fact that she has no interest in taking credit, and in a way it is - but it’s also a way of putting distance between herself and other people: of not getting involved in the nitty-gritty. When Stargirl and Leo come across an advertisement asking for a companion, Stargirl considers sending an anonymous card.

She does not, however, consider volunteering as a companion. Random acts of kindness are nice, but it’s relationships that make people truly happy, and relationships are hard.

One of the things that so appealed to me about Stargirl, I think, is that the vision of kindness it offers is very low-risk: although Stargirl has made it a full-time job, these are all things that you could do in little snippets of time. They require little emotional investment, and because they’re anonymous, they can’t be rejected. You’re unlikely to see an actual person react: you envision a little kid finding a dime or another reader seeing your note in a book, and in your mind, the other person is always pleased.

The big exception to this, of course, is Stargirl’s behavior at school: singing “Happy birthday” on the ukelele, becoming a cheerleader and then cheering for both teams. This is very loud and public and hence high-risk, and it ends badly: it alienates her classmates (because, Spinelli suggests, they have been trained for years in conformity) to the point that they shun her.

Now, on the one hand, shunning is clearly a cruel overreaction to Stargirl’s harmless quirkiness. But on the other hand, if a lot of people are disturbed and alienated by an act of kindness you are trying to commit - are, in short, not experiencing it as an act of kindness, but even as a kind of attack - then maybe it’s time to ask yourself if you don’t have an ulterior motive for the public ukelele playing. Maybe it should make them happy, but clearly it doesn’t.

For a character who is defined by her kindness, Stargirl is strangely tone deaf to other people’s feelings. I didn’t notice this when I first read the book, and it’s a little distressing to reread and see it now.