Book Reviews: Confinement and Curses
Apr. 15th, 2013 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cest_whatCross-posted from Tumblr.
Wildthorn by Jane Eagland
Historical queer YA.
Seventeen-year-old Louisa Cosgrove’s ambition is to be a doctor. A post as companion to the sister of one of her brother’s friends is a far fall from that, but when Louisa reaches what she thought was her new position, she finds something much more terrible. Her destination is an asylum for the insane, and they greet her there as Lucy Childs, a new patient. Protesting that that’s not her name only appears to confirm them in their opinion of her madness. Her only ally is Eliza, a young attendant who seems to believe her story. Louisa is determined to escape by one means or another, but she’s beginning to realise that it’s no accident that she’s here, but a betrayal.
Oh, this is good. For the first half of the book it didn’t seem as though it was really going to be a love story, or only peripherally, despite the tagline (Treachery locks her away. Love is the key). And it is primarily the story of Louisa’s incarceration and escape. The terrible stifling panic of losing liberty and voice – when nobody will listen to her and other people’s versions of reality are believed over hers – is difficult to read at times, but made a lot less so by three things. One is that the tagline lets you know some kind of escape is coming, of course. One is that the asylum scenes are interspersed with flashback scenes of her life before, which despite being in an awkward font help make Louisa’s medical ambitions as important a part of the story and her character as her current incarceration. (And also contextualise her queerness.) But most of all, despite the increasing constriction and confinement and silencing that’s closing around Louisa, this is not a passive narrative, or a passive heroine.
The cover is actually terrible, even though it’s quite pretty, because it doesn’t suggest an active or vigorous story and heroine at all. Louisa is affected by the asylum and its petty and great tyrannies, she’s not special, she doesn’t have any extraordinary ability to resist that the other patients don’t have. But she acts, and she thinks, and she tries, and the story is shaped by all the little and big ways she’s trying to think and act her way out of this. There’s suspense and excitement and yes, at about the halfway mark there begins to be romance.
Statistically, the love stories in most YA are pretty unsatisfying. I do tend to be more disappointed when the love stories in queer YA are unsatisfying, though, because there are so fewer stories to begin with. If I don’t really want the characters to kiss on the mouth, then it’s just a book that happens to include kissing. Obviously featuring queer characters in YA is important for representation whether there’s any kissing or not, but it’s the good love stories that I really want.
In Wildthorn I wanted them to kiss on the mouth. That part is still a secondary narrative to the escape, but you can feel them falling for each other and believe in it, and there’s pining and misunderstandings, and the forthright declaration of feelings, and it’s great.
I feel like this book was a good commentary on a lot of historical romance, too, whether it was directly intended to be or not. There’s this trope in historicals where the heroine’s rebellion against her constricting home life is portrayed as somehow cute and charming, part of what makes her a spirited heroine; by the end of the story she’s no longer protesting, partly because she’s found a greater freedom by the side of the man she’s in love with, partly because she doesn’t mind her many remaining constrictions due to being in love, partly because she’s grown up, as though wanting liberty and to be taken seriously is somehow childish and the product of youthful high spirits. In Wildthorn the confining elements of Louisa’s childhood, the (sometimes loving) voices telling her she’s wrong about what she thinks and knows and she can’t do the things she wants and believes in, are echoed in much more damning form at the asylum. The book cover with its corsetry suggests a fetishising of helplessness and social confinement, but the book rejects that strongly. When it’s up to other people to take care of you, they can betray you, and Louisa’s isn’t the only case at the asylum illustrating that. What she wants, what the book encourages you to want for her, is the independence to look after herself, and to help others.
I’m not really familiar enough with mental health issues to truly judge how the book does in representing them. Wildthorn Hall is a terrible place of neglect and corruption, so there aren’t any images of recovery or living well with a mental illness. But it does seem to me like it does a fairly good job? There’s no sense of it being unjust that Louisa is there because she isn’t mad; it’s very clear that nobody should be there, should be treated in that way, and that whatever state patients arrive in, the asylum makes everything worse. Louisa doesn’t divide her fellow inmates into those who are “really mad” and those who are suffering the effects of trauma and emotional abuse, either before or after admission; she’s very aware that she appears to have delusions, and that if she strikes out in frustration or curls up in despair it looks exactly like anybody else’s violent outburst or nervous fit.
(Additional content warnings: some third-party description of past child sexual abuse, and also stillbirth.)
Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones
Children’s/YA fantasy.
Twelve-year-old Gair, middle and most ordinary child of famous parents, has been brought up to fear and hate the other two peoples who live on the Moor: the water-dwelling, shape-shifting Dorig and the warring Giants with their strange magic. But thanks to a wrong done to a Dorig by their uncle when he was a boy, everybody on the Moor is living under a curse of misfortune. And Gair may be the one with the key to lifting it.
I remember reading this at the same time as The Homeward Bounders, about ten years ago. At the time I liked it better because it wasn’t horribly sad (my tolerance for sad things: even lower ten years ago than it is now), but I can see why it took me so long to reread it, all the same. It’s a little bit of a mess. (Not that I reread books a lot in general, but Diana Wynne Jones books are a special case.)
I really like the first half. DWJ does family so well, and the three siblings have a lightly drawn but wonderfully believable dynamic with each other and with their parents. The tone is great too: the realism and humour of the character voices melded with a more folkloric kind of world than DWJ often writes reminded me a bit of Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen or Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books.
The tone is the problem, though, because it can’t support the introduction of the Giants, when they come in. Everything about Gerald and Brenda, their world and their voices and their names, grates on the mood of the book. And I guess the culture clash was intended to be the point, to a certain extent? But it just threw me out of the story. The differences in Dorig society and cultural assumptions were fascinating, but the Giants’ differences just made the whole thing feel awkward, to me.
This book also has one of those DWJ plot resolutions that just isn’t explained clearly enough for me to understand it. Most of the time I love the way she thinks, the way magic works, the way cause and effect work in her books. But in a few of them I read the explanation over and over and it still doesn’t come clear. It feels as though someone is being very clever in this one, but I just don’t get it – what the hunting metaphor was about, how the terribly significant things that are said about the three powers actually relate to the actions needed to break the curse, etc. Which is frustrating.
There’s also some uneven treatment of a fat character. Brenda is a fairly sympathetic character – I have trouble caring about either of the Giants, but I care about her as much as I do Gerald – but the fact that she’s fat comes up every time she moves. Other people walk out of a room, she huffs or plods or stomps. It makes a certain amount of sense for the POV – Gair and the others are already over-awed by the heaviness of giants, so a fat Giant is especially going to be defined by that – but still, not good, that part.
Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan
Folkloric fantasy.
(Also apparently YA? I would not have classified it YA, but the Children’s Book Council of Australia shortlist would not lie to me.)
Miskaella’s island village has a heritage it doesn’t talk about. In times past there were men who took sea wives: enchanting women drawn out of seals. There are still children born with the look of the seal women about them. Unlovely Miskaella is one, and she grows up a pariah as a result, within her family and the village, friendless and loveless; and even more so on the day she wakes to find that she has a new, terrifying awareness of the world around her. Among other things, she can see now how you would take a woman from a seal. And in it, how she might make her village pay for its treatment of her.
This is a disarmingly lovely story. The themes are ugly – rejection, revenge, abduction and coercion, selfish cruelty in love – but somehow the human sympathy and the imagery keep it something beautiful all the way through. When a seal woman is drawn from the sea for a man, the spell of love is cast both ways, and is almost as costly for both. As a result, at the centre of this story is a knot of love and misery and yearning. The abducted seal women yearn for the sea and can never be happy away from it, but are trapped first by love for their abductor-husbands and children, and second by their husbands concealing their shed skins so they can’t return to the waves. The husbands of the island are also trapped by their love and can’t bear to let their wives go, but see and keenly feel their unhappiness and are helpless against it and unhappy themselves. There’s only one moment when the darkness of the premise is extended to horror – when a man is found to be keeping his secret sea wife in a dark cabinet away from his family – and even then I’m not sure whether it was intended to be as chilling as I read it. The players are all tangled in this knot, and all are treated sympathetically, even though ultimately culpability lies with the beguiled husbands.
There are a series of POVs through the book, women and men, but interestingly, there’s never a voice given to one of the sea wives. They barely even get any direct dialogue. They remain Other, even when they’re intimately close as mothers and wives. But they’re presented as sympathetically as the other characters, and though she doesn’t get a voice, one of the major characters is a seal woman, and her actions and choices are vital to the plot. A sea wife’s perspective on her exile would have been an important addition to the story, but the decision to exclude them was also an important choice, I think. The idea that the seal women are not of this world and can never be happy or belong here is an essential part of the premise, and in choosing not to give them a direct voice Lanagan reinforced their disconnection from the world of the villagers, without cutting them out of the story’s sympathy or denying the validity of their thoughts and feelings.
(I also unexpectedly loved Trudle’s POV section, and that choice for how to wrap up Miskaella’s bitter, tempestuous life story.)
Wildthorn by Jane Eagland
Historical queer YA.
Seventeen-year-old Louisa Cosgrove’s ambition is to be a doctor. A post as companion to the sister of one of her brother’s friends is a far fall from that, but when Louisa reaches what she thought was her new position, she finds something much more terrible. Her destination is an asylum for the insane, and they greet her there as Lucy Childs, a new patient. Protesting that that’s not her name only appears to confirm them in their opinion of her madness. Her only ally is Eliza, a young attendant who seems to believe her story. Louisa is determined to escape by one means or another, but she’s beginning to realise that it’s no accident that she’s here, but a betrayal.
Oh, this is good. For the first half of the book it didn’t seem as though it was really going to be a love story, or only peripherally, despite the tagline (Treachery locks her away. Love is the key). And it is primarily the story of Louisa’s incarceration and escape. The terrible stifling panic of losing liberty and voice – when nobody will listen to her and other people’s versions of reality are believed over hers – is difficult to read at times, but made a lot less so by three things. One is that the tagline lets you know some kind of escape is coming, of course. One is that the asylum scenes are interspersed with flashback scenes of her life before, which despite being in an awkward font help make Louisa’s medical ambitions as important a part of the story and her character as her current incarceration. (And also contextualise her queerness.) But most of all, despite the increasing constriction and confinement and silencing that’s closing around Louisa, this is not a passive narrative, or a passive heroine.
The cover is actually terrible, even though it’s quite pretty, because it doesn’t suggest an active or vigorous story and heroine at all. Louisa is affected by the asylum and its petty and great tyrannies, she’s not special, she doesn’t have any extraordinary ability to resist that the other patients don’t have. But she acts, and she thinks, and she tries, and the story is shaped by all the little and big ways she’s trying to think and act her way out of this. There’s suspense and excitement and yes, at about the halfway mark there begins to be romance.
Statistically, the love stories in most YA are pretty unsatisfying. I do tend to be more disappointed when the love stories in queer YA are unsatisfying, though, because there are so fewer stories to begin with. If I don’t really want the characters to kiss on the mouth, then it’s just a book that happens to include kissing. Obviously featuring queer characters in YA is important for representation whether there’s any kissing or not, but it’s the good love stories that I really want.
In Wildthorn I wanted them to kiss on the mouth. That part is still a secondary narrative to the escape, but you can feel them falling for each other and believe in it, and there’s pining and misunderstandings, and the forthright declaration of feelings, and it’s great.
I feel like this book was a good commentary on a lot of historical romance, too, whether it was directly intended to be or not. There’s this trope in historicals where the heroine’s rebellion against her constricting home life is portrayed as somehow cute and charming, part of what makes her a spirited heroine; by the end of the story she’s no longer protesting, partly because she’s found a greater freedom by the side of the man she’s in love with, partly because she doesn’t mind her many remaining constrictions due to being in love, partly because she’s grown up, as though wanting liberty and to be taken seriously is somehow childish and the product of youthful high spirits. In Wildthorn the confining elements of Louisa’s childhood, the (sometimes loving) voices telling her she’s wrong about what she thinks and knows and she can’t do the things she wants and believes in, are echoed in much more damning form at the asylum. The book cover with its corsetry suggests a fetishising of helplessness and social confinement, but the book rejects that strongly. When it’s up to other people to take care of you, they can betray you, and Louisa’s isn’t the only case at the asylum illustrating that. What she wants, what the book encourages you to want for her, is the independence to look after herself, and to help others.
I’m not really familiar enough with mental health issues to truly judge how the book does in representing them. Wildthorn Hall is a terrible place of neglect and corruption, so there aren’t any images of recovery or living well with a mental illness. But it does seem to me like it does a fairly good job? There’s no sense of it being unjust that Louisa is there because she isn’t mad; it’s very clear that nobody should be there, should be treated in that way, and that whatever state patients arrive in, the asylum makes everything worse. Louisa doesn’t divide her fellow inmates into those who are “really mad” and those who are suffering the effects of trauma and emotional abuse, either before or after admission; she’s very aware that she appears to have delusions, and that if she strikes out in frustration or curls up in despair it looks exactly like anybody else’s violent outburst or nervous fit.
(Additional content warnings: some third-party description of past child sexual abuse, and also stillbirth.)
Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones
Children’s/YA fantasy.
Twelve-year-old Gair, middle and most ordinary child of famous parents, has been brought up to fear and hate the other two peoples who live on the Moor: the water-dwelling, shape-shifting Dorig and the warring Giants with their strange magic. But thanks to a wrong done to a Dorig by their uncle when he was a boy, everybody on the Moor is living under a curse of misfortune. And Gair may be the one with the key to lifting it.
I remember reading this at the same time as The Homeward Bounders, about ten years ago. At the time I liked it better because it wasn’t horribly sad (my tolerance for sad things: even lower ten years ago than it is now), but I can see why it took me so long to reread it, all the same. It’s a little bit of a mess. (Not that I reread books a lot in general, but Diana Wynne Jones books are a special case.)
I really like the first half. DWJ does family so well, and the three siblings have a lightly drawn but wonderfully believable dynamic with each other and with their parents. The tone is great too: the realism and humour of the character voices melded with a more folkloric kind of world than DWJ often writes reminded me a bit of Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen or Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books.
The tone is the problem, though, because it can’t support the introduction of the Giants, when they come in. Everything about Gerald and Brenda, their world and their voices and their names, grates on the mood of the book. And I guess the culture clash was intended to be the point, to a certain extent? But it just threw me out of the story. The differences in Dorig society and cultural assumptions were fascinating, but the Giants’ differences just made the whole thing feel awkward, to me.
This book also has one of those DWJ plot resolutions that just isn’t explained clearly enough for me to understand it. Most of the time I love the way she thinks, the way magic works, the way cause and effect work in her books. But in a few of them I read the explanation over and over and it still doesn’t come clear. It feels as though someone is being very clever in this one, but I just don’t get it – what the hunting metaphor was about, how the terribly significant things that are said about the three powers actually relate to the actions needed to break the curse, etc. Which is frustrating.
There’s also some uneven treatment of a fat character. Brenda is a fairly sympathetic character – I have trouble caring about either of the Giants, but I care about her as much as I do Gerald – but the fact that she’s fat comes up every time she moves. Other people walk out of a room, she huffs or plods or stomps. It makes a certain amount of sense for the POV – Gair and the others are already over-awed by the heaviness of giants, so a fat Giant is especially going to be defined by that – but still, not good, that part.
Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan
Folkloric fantasy.
(Also apparently YA? I would not have classified it YA, but the Children’s Book Council of Australia shortlist would not lie to me.)
Miskaella’s island village has a heritage it doesn’t talk about. In times past there were men who took sea wives: enchanting women drawn out of seals. There are still children born with the look of the seal women about them. Unlovely Miskaella is one, and she grows up a pariah as a result, within her family and the village, friendless and loveless; and even more so on the day she wakes to find that she has a new, terrifying awareness of the world around her. Among other things, she can see now how you would take a woman from a seal. And in it, how she might make her village pay for its treatment of her.
This is a disarmingly lovely story. The themes are ugly – rejection, revenge, abduction and coercion, selfish cruelty in love – but somehow the human sympathy and the imagery keep it something beautiful all the way through. When a seal woman is drawn from the sea for a man, the spell of love is cast both ways, and is almost as costly for both. As a result, at the centre of this story is a knot of love and misery and yearning. The abducted seal women yearn for the sea and can never be happy away from it, but are trapped first by love for their abductor-husbands and children, and second by their husbands concealing their shed skins so they can’t return to the waves. The husbands of the island are also trapped by their love and can’t bear to let their wives go, but see and keenly feel their unhappiness and are helpless against it and unhappy themselves. There’s only one moment when the darkness of the premise is extended to horror – when a man is found to be keeping his secret sea wife in a dark cabinet away from his family – and even then I’m not sure whether it was intended to be as chilling as I read it. The players are all tangled in this knot, and all are treated sympathetically, even though ultimately culpability lies with the beguiled husbands.
There are a series of POVs through the book, women and men, but interestingly, there’s never a voice given to one of the sea wives. They barely even get any direct dialogue. They remain Other, even when they’re intimately close as mothers and wives. But they’re presented as sympathetically as the other characters, and though she doesn’t get a voice, one of the major characters is a seal woman, and her actions and choices are vital to the plot. A sea wife’s perspective on her exile would have been an important addition to the story, but the decision to exclude them was also an important choice, I think. The idea that the seal women are not of this world and can never be happy or belong here is an essential part of the premise, and in choosing not to give them a direct voice Lanagan reinforced their disconnection from the world of the villagers, without cutting them out of the story’s sympathy or denying the validity of their thoughts and feelings.
(I also unexpectedly loved Trudle’s POV section, and that choice for how to wrap up Miskaella’s bitter, tempestuous life story.)
no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 09:40 am (UTC)