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juushikaTitle: When Women Were Dragons
Author: Kelly Barnhill
Published: Doubleday, 2022
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 350
Total Page Count: 393,600
Text Number: 1488
Read Because: reviewed bymrissa, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A girl finds her childhood forever altered by the Mass Dragoning of 1955, which takes her aunt and countless other women. Transformation into a dragon isn't a metaphor for a single issue or even for discrimination as a whole—dragons are rage and ability, they're the full spectrum of actualization and the complex ways it's suppressed. This is the fantastic approach; but the book, unfortunately, isn't great. I'm on board with "mid-century American sexism: bad," but the depictions of it are such a grind that I almost DNF'd. The happy ending is too easily won; the humor fails to land; the dragons, fatally, never feel real—their size and danger is changeable at the convenience of the plot, which weakens the atmosphere and even the central metaphor.
But the real failure is intersectionality. Multiple characters are queer, which is fantastic; but increasingly complex intersections of gender and, most critically, of race are relegated to further and further corners of the wider world. An attempt is made, but it's insubstantial. So while I like the concept, while I appreciate the nuanced depiction of intergenerational trauma, this feels weirdly familiar and even staid for a book about women becoming literal dragons.
Title: Pinocchio
Author: Carlo Collodi
Translator: no idea!
Narrator: Rebecca Burns
Published: Tantor Audio, 2006
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 394,475
Text Number: 1492
Read Because: children's lit on audio to help me sleep; I own a hardback of this, but borrowed an audiobook from the library
Review: I have a lot of success with children's literature on audio—unsurprisingly, it's a great format to receive the genre. But Pinocchio is the most frustrating and least successful of the children's books that I've read this way. Some of that isn't the book's fault: it differs significantly from the Disney version, and that cognitive dissonance threw me off; the short chapters would be better paced by a live reader than by my reading app's sleep function. Nonetheless, a weird book. Pinocchio is always a "real boy" in the sense that his character flaws are disobedience and gullibility, like any child. But as a result he never grows into meaningful selfhood; instead, he rambles through the chaos of the plot and then receives an arbitrary reward. Silly, whimsical, but without the evocative element that I enjoy in the genre; meanspirited and the humor doesn't land for me.
Title: Chocky
Author: John Wyndham
Published: New York Review Books, 2015 (1968)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 175
Total Page Count: 395,345
Text Number: 1496
Read Because: reviewed byrachelmanija, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: When
his 12-year-old adopted son begins having conversations with himself, his father assumes an imaginary friend—but the explanation may be much stranger. The age of this text and its outsider PoV work delightfully in tandem: this is cozy, quaint, humorous, compassionate (albeit in a flawed and dated way), seen from a bit of a distance such that the reader, genre-aware, feels smugly in the know without becoming frustrated by the PoV's incredulity; a low concept approach to a high concept premise. It makes for a playful and curious little read.
Author: Kelly Barnhill
Published: Doubleday, 2022
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 350
Total Page Count: 393,600
Text Number: 1488
Read Because: reviewed by
mrissa, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: A girl finds her childhood forever altered by the Mass Dragoning of 1955, which takes her aunt and countless other women. Transformation into a dragon isn't a metaphor for a single issue or even for discrimination as a whole—dragons are rage and ability, they're the full spectrum of actualization and the complex ways it's suppressed. This is the fantastic approach; but the book, unfortunately, isn't great. I'm on board with "mid-century American sexism: bad," but the depictions of it are such a grind that I almost DNF'd. The happy ending is too easily won; the humor fails to land; the dragons, fatally, never feel real—their size and danger is changeable at the convenience of the plot, which weakens the atmosphere and even the central metaphor.
But the real failure is intersectionality. Multiple characters are queer, which is fantastic; but increasingly complex intersections of gender and, most critically, of race are relegated to further and further corners of the wider world. An attempt is made, but it's insubstantial. So while I like the concept, while I appreciate the nuanced depiction of intergenerational trauma, this feels weirdly familiar and even staid for a book about women becoming literal dragons.
Title: Pinocchio
Author: Carlo Collodi
Translator: no idea!
Narrator: Rebecca Burns
Published: Tantor Audio, 2006
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 394,475
Text Number: 1492
Read Because: children's lit on audio to help me sleep; I own a hardback of this, but borrowed an audiobook from the library
Review: I have a lot of success with children's literature on audio—unsurprisingly, it's a great format to receive the genre. But Pinocchio is the most frustrating and least successful of the children's books that I've read this way. Some of that isn't the book's fault: it differs significantly from the Disney version, and that cognitive dissonance threw me off; the short chapters would be better paced by a live reader than by my reading app's sleep function. Nonetheless, a weird book. Pinocchio is always a "real boy" in the sense that his character flaws are disobedience and gullibility, like any child. But as a result he never grows into meaningful selfhood; instead, he rambles through the chaos of the plot and then receives an arbitrary reward. Silly, whimsical, but without the evocative element that I enjoy in the genre; meanspirited and the humor doesn't land for me.
Title: Chocky
Author: John Wyndham
Published: New York Review Books, 2015 (1968)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 175
Total Page Count: 395,345
Text Number: 1496
Read Because: reviewed by
rachelmanija, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: When
his 12-year-old adopted son begins having conversations with himself, his father assumes an imaginary friend—but the explanation may be much stranger. The age of this text and its outsider PoV work delightfully in tandem: this is cozy, quaint, humorous, compassionate (albeit in a flawed and dated way), seen from a bit of a distance such that the reader, genre-aware, feels smugly in the know without becoming frustrated by the PoV's incredulity; a low concept approach to a high concept premise. It makes for a playful and curious little read.
