Final Trip Books
Oct. 28th, 2023 10:13 amNow that I am back from my trip, it’s time to wrap up my reviews of trip books!
First, a couple of books that I picked up at the Tenement Museum, both written by Jewish women in the Lower East Side in the first decades of the twentieth century. Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl; Or the Battle against Free Love, translated by Jessica Kirzane, was originally written in Yiddish and published serially in a Yiddish newspaper before being collected into a book.
It’s about a lonely girl looking for love on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s. She immigrated alone, and lives alone, and as such men see her as the perfect target for their spiels about free love. “Don’t you want to live?” they coax. “Don’t worry about the future. You’re getting older, you know! Soon no one will want you! I love you so much that I think about you day and night.”
Karpilove is of the opinion that at least 95% of the men who claim to believe in free love are simply libertines rationalizing their desire to sleep with women without taking any responsibility for their future wellbeing or the wellbeing of any baby who might result. In the introduction, Kirzane seems a little uncomfortable with this stance, but I think Karpilove has put her finger on a genuine problem with free love in a society without effective and reliable birth control: the risk is inevitably hugely asymmetrical. The man risks almost nothing, while the girl risks crushing social censure, and even if she didn’t (a favorite free love line seems to be “there should be no social censure for love, so let’s just pretend it doesn’t exist!”), there is the very real risk of death or medical complications from pregnancy, and the problem of supporting a baby whose father takes no responsibility in the matter.
( Spoilers for the ending )
Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, meanwhile, is a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl who breaks away from her tyrannical father, who scotched her three older sisters’ love matches then marries them off to horrible men. Sara, determined to avoid this fate, works her way through night school and then college to become a teacher… at which point her father, who has been widowed and made a bad match for himself, begs her to take him in, because he doesn’t want to live with his new wife.
“TELL HIM HE’S MADE HIS BED AND NOW HE HAS TO LIE IN IT,” I yelled, because that’s just exactly what he told his three oldest daughters who did not, in fact, make their own beds, because he picked the husbands for them. But no. We end with Sara musing that blood is thicker than water and family is family etc. etc., and she’s going to take him in. Sara, I really think you were doing more than enough sending ten dollars a week so your horrible father and his horrible wife could live in comfort! It’s more than you did for your poor sister who never did you any wrong!
Now for something completely different:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants and genarti lent me Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Prophecies, Libels & Dreams: Stories of Califa, a series of short stories set in the same world as Wilce’s Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, which subtitle gives you a pretty good idea of the aesthetic of this magical-alt-California where the army uniform includes a special dress lipstick.
I read the Flora Segunda trilogy back in 2013/2014, and ended the final book with the feeling that a sequel was imminent. It has not appeared, and in the interim I’ve forgotten almost everything that happens in the original trilogy, but reading these short stories has made me sorry all over again that the series never continued, because the world was so strange and different from anything else being published in YA at that time. Possibly that’s what killed it.
But it’s equally possible that Wilce just ran out of steam on Flora’s story. In books two and three I definitely got the impression that she was really more interested in the epic romantic tragedy of the parent generation, which is an impression confirmed by this book: all of the stories are about the parent generation, with a definite focus on Hardhands who I don’t remember at all from the Flora Segunda books.
Finally, I slogged to the end of Anne McCaffrey’s Dinosaur Planet, which I picked up on a whim because Anne McCaffrey is always entertainingly bonkers, right? Except no! This book is neither entertaining nor bonkers! Most of the book is just a routine scouting mission, which could be fascinating in the right hands, but McCaffrey seems to be phoning it in. It’s not until the final chapters that the characters learn what the readers have known since they saw the title: this planet is packed with dinosaurs, real Earth dinosaurs who must have been transported across the galaxy by… someone. We end the book none the wiser as to how or why anyone would do this. And they barely interact with the dinosaurs at all: no one makes a dinosaur friend and rides a triceratops into battle or anything. Totally inconclusive ending, too. Very disappointing all around.
First, a couple of books that I picked up at the Tenement Museum, both written by Jewish women in the Lower East Side in the first decades of the twentieth century. Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl; Or the Battle against Free Love, translated by Jessica Kirzane, was originally written in Yiddish and published serially in a Yiddish newspaper before being collected into a book.
It’s about a lonely girl looking for love on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s. She immigrated alone, and lives alone, and as such men see her as the perfect target for their spiels about free love. “Don’t you want to live?” they coax. “Don’t worry about the future. You’re getting older, you know! Soon no one will want you! I love you so much that I think about you day and night.”
Karpilove is of the opinion that at least 95% of the men who claim to believe in free love are simply libertines rationalizing their desire to sleep with women without taking any responsibility for their future wellbeing or the wellbeing of any baby who might result. In the introduction, Kirzane seems a little uncomfortable with this stance, but I think Karpilove has put her finger on a genuine problem with free love in a society without effective and reliable birth control: the risk is inevitably hugely asymmetrical. The man risks almost nothing, while the girl risks crushing social censure, and even if she didn’t (a favorite free love line seems to be “there should be no social censure for love, so let’s just pretend it doesn’t exist!”), there is the very real risk of death or medical complications from pregnancy, and the problem of supporting a baby whose father takes no responsibility in the matter.
( Spoilers for the ending )
Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, meanwhile, is a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl who breaks away from her tyrannical father, who scotched her three older sisters’ love matches then marries them off to horrible men. Sara, determined to avoid this fate, works her way through night school and then college to become a teacher… at which point her father, who has been widowed and made a bad match for himself, begs her to take him in, because he doesn’t want to live with his new wife.
“TELL HIM HE’S MADE HIS BED AND NOW HE HAS TO LIE IN IT,” I yelled, because that’s just exactly what he told his three oldest daughters who did not, in fact, make their own beds, because he picked the husbands for them. But no. We end with Sara musing that blood is thicker than water and family is family etc. etc., and she’s going to take him in. Sara, I really think you were doing more than enough sending ten dollars a week so your horrible father and his horrible wife could live in comfort! It’s more than you did for your poor sister who never did you any wrong!
Now for something completely different:
skygiants and genarti lent me Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Prophecies, Libels & Dreams: Stories of Califa, a series of short stories set in the same world as Wilce’s Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, which subtitle gives you a pretty good idea of the aesthetic of this magical-alt-California where the army uniform includes a special dress lipstick. I read the Flora Segunda trilogy back in 2013/2014, and ended the final book with the feeling that a sequel was imminent. It has not appeared, and in the interim I’ve forgotten almost everything that happens in the original trilogy, but reading these short stories has made me sorry all over again that the series never continued, because the world was so strange and different from anything else being published in YA at that time. Possibly that’s what killed it.
But it’s equally possible that Wilce just ran out of steam on Flora’s story. In books two and three I definitely got the impression that she was really more interested in the epic romantic tragedy of the parent generation, which is an impression confirmed by this book: all of the stories are about the parent generation, with a definite focus on Hardhands who I don’t remember at all from the Flora Segunda books.
Finally, I slogged to the end of Anne McCaffrey’s Dinosaur Planet, which I picked up on a whim because Anne McCaffrey is always entertainingly bonkers, right? Except no! This book is neither entertaining nor bonkers! Most of the book is just a routine scouting mission, which could be fascinating in the right hands, but McCaffrey seems to be phoning it in. It’s not until the final chapters that the characters learn what the readers have known since they saw the title: this planet is packed with dinosaurs, real Earth dinosaurs who must have been transported across the galaxy by… someone. We end the book none the wiser as to how or why anyone would do this. And they barely interact with the dinosaurs at all: no one makes a dinosaur friend and rides a triceratops into battle or anything. Totally inconclusive ending, too. Very disappointing all around.
