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juushikaTitle: The Secret Garden
Author: Frances Hodgon Burnett
Narrator: Johanna Ward
Published: Blackstone Audio, 2009 (1910)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 329,350
Text Number: 1173
Read Because: reread, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This is a fascinating reread, my first in many years. Everything I loved in the text is still there: the garden is a phenomenal metaphor for cultivating personal growth and self-ownership, and the book's atmosphere, the prickly, dynamic characters and the idyllic descriptions and, most especially, the conspicuous narrator, are just as I remember and as lovely to revisit. It's a deserving classic that lands just on the endearing side of twee. But the themes have aged, and so have I, and the exaggerated depiction of the power of positive thinking reads not just as unrealistic but as profoundly flawed. It's set against substantial issues like poverty, neglect, disability, and that particularly glaring parable about the abuse victim, and these issues are erased or unresolved. This would be a different book if its theme were interrogated—certainly less escapist. But as a disabled person, that escapism already feels inaccessible to me.
Title: The Fourth Pig
Author: Naomi Mitchison
Published: Princeton University Press, 2014 (1936)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 329,715
Text Number: 1177
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 18 stories and poems of the fantastic. This peaks early, with the first and titular story about the fourth of the three little pigs and their intimate relationship with the wolf/death—as well as being phenomenally written, an extended but vivid metaphor, it speaks directly to my inner world and I love it more than I can explain. I worried that nothing else in the collection could live up to that, and indeed nothing does, in no small part because I bounced off of most of the poetry—which is fine, similarly strange and fantastic, but slid out of my grasp.
But Michiston's style is diverse, sometimes dreamlike, sometimes humorous, frequently evocative. She experiments with form, from dense prose to poetry to an entire five-act play (Kate Crackernuts—unexpectedly good.) Her concept of the fantastic, particularly the depiction of fairyland that reoccurs in later stories, is compelling. "The Little Mermaiden" has a unique outsider-PoV. As with all short fiction collections, the quality varies—and it has perhaps too strong a start. But Mitchison's diversity of themes and styles are effectively cumulative and distinctly her own. I expect this holds up well to rereads.
Title: A Line in the Dark
Author: Malinda Lo
Narrator: Jennifer Lim
Published: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing, 2017
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 285
Total Page Count: 330,170
Text Number: 1181
Read Because: reading the author, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The complicated relationship between four teenage girls comes to a head when a crime occurs. I badly wish this were written more as a why/how-dunnit than a whodunnit. It has intriguing and nuanced elements—twisted teenage intimacy, flawed characters, claustrophobic inner worlds and exterior pressures like race and class, flirtations with the predatory lesbian trope; at moments, these elements coalesce. But everything about the structure is awful: first person present tense in the first half, the plague of YA and as unenjoyable here as always; in the second half, narrative contrivances which exist to maintain the mystery force a distance between the reader and the characters, sabotaging any investment in their motives or arcs. The ending twist is meant to substitute for that intimate view by casting previous interactions in a new light, but it's not smart enough to achieve that. This needed to be a book about processing, about fallout. What it is instead is mostly frustrating.
Author: Frances Hodgon Burnett
Narrator: Johanna Ward
Published: Blackstone Audio, 2009 (1910)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 329,350
Text Number: 1173
Read Because: reread, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This is a fascinating reread, my first in many years. Everything I loved in the text is still there: the garden is a phenomenal metaphor for cultivating personal growth and self-ownership, and the book's atmosphere, the prickly, dynamic characters and the idyllic descriptions and, most especially, the conspicuous narrator, are just as I remember and as lovely to revisit. It's a deserving classic that lands just on the endearing side of twee. But the themes have aged, and so have I, and the exaggerated depiction of the power of positive thinking reads not just as unrealistic but as profoundly flawed. It's set against substantial issues like poverty, neglect, disability, and that particularly glaring parable about the abuse victim, and these issues are erased or unresolved. This would be a different book if its theme were interrogated—certainly less escapist. But as a disabled person, that escapism already feels inaccessible to me.
Title: The Fourth Pig
Author: Naomi Mitchison
Published: Princeton University Press, 2014 (1936)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 329,715
Text Number: 1177
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 18 stories and poems of the fantastic. This peaks early, with the first and titular story about the fourth of the three little pigs and their intimate relationship with the wolf/death—as well as being phenomenally written, an extended but vivid metaphor, it speaks directly to my inner world and I love it more than I can explain. I worried that nothing else in the collection could live up to that, and indeed nothing does, in no small part because I bounced off of most of the poetry—which is fine, similarly strange and fantastic, but slid out of my grasp.
But Michiston's style is diverse, sometimes dreamlike, sometimes humorous, frequently evocative. She experiments with form, from dense prose to poetry to an entire five-act play (Kate Crackernuts—unexpectedly good.) Her concept of the fantastic, particularly the depiction of fairyland that reoccurs in later stories, is compelling. "The Little Mermaiden" has a unique outsider-PoV. As with all short fiction collections, the quality varies—and it has perhaps too strong a start. But Mitchison's diversity of themes and styles are effectively cumulative and distinctly her own. I expect this holds up well to rereads.
Title: A Line in the Dark
Author: Malinda Lo
Narrator: Jennifer Lim
Published: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing, 2017
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 285
Total Page Count: 330,170
Text Number: 1181
Read Because: reading the author, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The complicated relationship between four teenage girls comes to a head when a crime occurs. I badly wish this were written more as a why/how-dunnit than a whodunnit. It has intriguing and nuanced elements—twisted teenage intimacy, flawed characters, claustrophobic inner worlds and exterior pressures like race and class, flirtations with the predatory lesbian trope; at moments, these elements coalesce. But everything about the structure is awful: first person present tense in the first half, the plague of YA and as unenjoyable here as always; in the second half, narrative contrivances which exist to maintain the mystery force a distance between the reader and the characters, sabotaging any investment in their motives or arcs. The ending twist is meant to substitute for that intimate view by casting previous interactions in a new light, but it's not smart enough to achieve that. This needed to be a book about processing, about fallout. What it is instead is mostly frustrating.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-01 12:34 pm (UTC)