Reading roundup: YA and Uprooted
42. Naomi Novik, Uprooted -- I bought this book while sitting on the tarmac during boarding attempt #2 (I think) of my flight to Japan, because I didn't have anything I was passionate about reading at the moment and I felt like I deserved it after the nonsense with the flight (sweet summer child, etc. -- the nonsense was only starting, of course). This proved to be a very good call! I read it while waiting for my plane to finally take off, and on the flights before and after sleeping, and on Shinkansen when I ran out of things to type, and it proved to be the perfect travel companion book: light and kind, easy to get into because the worldbuilding is fairy-tale-simple, and easy to dip in and out of as things called me away. I really enjoyed it! Spoilers from here!
I instantly clicked with Agnieszka's narrative voice, although it was rather odd to be reading Novik without the Victorian froufrous (I mean, I really enjoy the writing in Temeraire, too, and the style works very well for the story, but it was refreshing to be in Agnieszka's much more straightforward and pragmatic way of telling a story). I think Agnieszka herself is my favorite thing about the book -- she's such a fun heroine! down-to-earth and funny, with a bite when she loses her temper and a fond wryness about most things. And her story is neat, too, the trajectory from village girl who finds stuff in the forest to unexpected tribute to unusual witch to a young Baba Yaga figure of sorts. egelantier's review mentioned that despite the way the blurb made it sound, this book was a bildungsroman, but I did not realize it was leading up to Baba Yaga-ness -- that's pretty awesome!
What the blurb makes it sound like as a Beauty-and-the-Beast story between Agnieszka and the Dragon, and although there is a romance between them, it didn't feel like that at all. I liked the Dragon, too, but mostly I liked seeing him through Agnieszka's eyes: that fond wryness about his fussiness and his spluttering exasperation with her, and also the genuine admiration for the way he loves magic, and does the necessary, dangerous, self-sacrificing things with the same air of annoyance at the improper workings of the universe with which he puts up with Agnieszka's bungled spells. NGL, I found the UST between them really hot, although in retrospect it's probably not that surprising, given how much I love "Nice Work if You Can Get It", which is also about an unlooked-for relationship between a fussy book-learning sort of person and a wild natural talent of sorts, with "the robots made them do it" in place of "magic made them do it". But anyway. I liked Agnieszka's relationship with the Dragon, and I also really liked that it wasn't the most important thing in this book, not by a long shot, and probably not even in the top 3 (the top 3 being stopping the Wood from destroying her valley, saving her best friend, and coming into her own power, I would say). I liked that I wasn't sure, until the very end, that the Dragon *would* come back, and really liked it that he did. Also, the scene where, in order to save Agnieszka, he drinks from the river water and thus binds himself to the valley in a way he has been resisting for decades really worked for me, and made me think of a similar scene in Tigana which does not -- this one felt earned and in character, unlike that one.
Another thing I really liked about this book were the antagonists. The book is very fairy-tale like in its magic and narrative, and it would've been easy to end up with black and white morality, but there's actually the opposite of that. While I enjoyed Agnieszka the narrator more, I think the thing I found the most interesting about it was Marek. He's such a fascinating character, in the way the narrative treats him, a really neat deconstruction of a fairytale hero-prince. We first hear about him as a hero, first meet him as a would-be rapist, he leads countless men to their deaths with very little thought and no enchantment on him, and yet... Agnieszka, who is very well aware of all these things, is still swayed by his charisma at times, and not wholly unsympathetic to the orphaned little boy still hoping to rescue his mother from 20 years of captivity in the Wood. He looks like a hero, he looks like a king, even in death and failure. I really liked what the story did with him. I also liked Solya, who seems to be completely amoral and thus a first-rate survivor, but who cannot be entirely dismissed because he is also really good at his chosen field of magic. And the Wood itself, of course, the primary villain, and the Queen at the heart of it gets her story and motivation, too, and her closure and healing at last. As I said somewhere else in a comment, I really liked all the shades of grey -- with Marek, who dies looking like a king, undisillusioned, after spending the lives of 6000+ men in vain, with the Wood-Queen, who finally finds peace despite all the terrible things she's done. It's all very neatly done.
Alosha the sword-mistress wizard and the Vlad, the Baron of Yellow River were interesting characters, too. And I actually wish there had been more about Kasia, who gets a very interesting arc of her own. I kind of want to read a sequel about Kasia the boy-king's champion.
Also, I should mention that the story felt authentically Slavic to me. I don't think it's even the names so much as something about the cadence -- it just felt right, the right down-to-earth kind of story, characters caring about the right sort of things. It actually reminded me of Gromyko's fantasy quite a bit, the early Volha books and even the beginning of God Krysy, which felt fitting. And the grounded fairy-tale feel also reminded me of McKinley. I wouldn't have associated Novik with either of those authors before, but this book reminded me of the things I like best about them, so, that's a very good thing.
Quotes (a lot of these, because I really liked the writing):
"I know I'm making her [Kasia] sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her."
"I think he would have liked to loom over me, and because he couldn't was even more angry."
"if only he hadn't just twitted me for being a rag, the way everyone who loved me did, but with malice instead of affection"
"I was a glaring blot on the perfection [of the Tower[. But I didn't care: I didn't feel I owed him beauty."
"I'd helped at butchering time, held the bucket for the pig's blood, but the thought of putting a knife into a man was something else, unimaginable. So I didn't imagine it. I only put the knife on the tray, and went upstairs."
"As strange as it may sound, I wasn't only afraid of what would happen to me [if Prince Marek died after she bludgeoned him]; I didn't want the prince to die. He was still half in my head as the shining hero of legend, all confusedly tangled up with the beast who'd just been pawing at me."
"He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmer--'My father's a woodcutter,' I said--'Of axe-swinging lummocks!' he snarled."
"I wasn't sure if I'd done her [the wife of a man corrupted by the Wood] any real kindness, or only spared myself pain" [with the time-stopping spell]
"That's nonsense," he said, almost plaitively, and stared down at his own arm with an air of frustration: as though he would rather have the corruption back, instead of having to consider that he might be wrong.
On Jaga's magic: "I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of forest that I had never seen before, and her words were like another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope [...] She didn't care how I got to the blueberries: she only pointed me in the proper direction and let me wander my way over to them, feeling out the ground beneath my feet."
"He hated it so very much I almost felt sorry for him."
"I must give him this credit: he sulked for the rest of the week, and then he dug out a small collection of other spellbooks from his shelves, to advise me in my blundering through my new forest, though it was foreign country to him. He did still resent my success, not from jealousy but as a matter of principle: it offended his sense of the proper order of things that my slapdash workings did work"
"I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around."
"She[Kasia]'d hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn't set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn't forced me to go three hours' walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. [...] My mother hand't brushed my hair three hundred strokes a night, keeping me beautiful, as though she wanted me taken; as though she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her borthers and sisters, the ones she let herlsef love"
"she'd even hated me for being taken. She hadn't been chosen after all. I saw her sitting at the feast afterwards, out of place [...] she had never imaginged herself here, left behind in a village, in a house that hadn't meant to welcome her back."
"I suppose it might seem strange that I should thank him by shouting at him, but it meant more than thanks: I wanted him to be human."
"You'd have to put them [the warhorses] all down after this in any case."
"These are trained warhorses! They're worth their weight in silver."
"And purging elixir is worth their weight in gold," the Dragon said. "If you felt tender towards them, you shouldn't have brought them into the Wood. But don't distress yourself overly. Chances are the question won't arise."
"I vomited on the grass. 'Not now!' the Dragon shouted at me, as though I could help it."
"I had always been dubious of war stories, songs of battle: the occasional fights between boys in the village square had always ended in mud and bloody noses and clawing, snot and tears, nothing graceful or glorious, and I didn't see how adding swords and death to the mix could make it any better. But I couldn't have imagined the horror of this."
"I would have thought any one of them [the chairs in a waiting room] a throne, if there hadn't been four in a row."
Marek, on his mother: "His beautiful wife, who ran away from him with a Rosyan boy who sang her charming songs in the garden. That's what they said of her, until I was old enough to kill men for saying it."
"'Listen, Nieshka--' I glared at him [Marek] speechlessly; how dare he put a pet name on me?"
"'Did Uncle Marek try to have us killed? I'm not a child,' he [Prince Stashek] added, looking at my face, as if I needed him to say so, when he'd just asked me such a thing."
Sarkan to Agnieszka: "Stop. I don't know how you've done any of this, and I imagine I'll be appalled when I learn, but you've been too profligate with your magic for one hour."
"I was glad to hear them name Alosha a traitor: maybe that meant she was still alive."
"But that [the attack] almost made the baron's soldiers happier. They stopped watching me and Sarkan like we were poisonous snakes, and began comfortably bawling out orders and making siege-preparations, work they all plainly knew well."
"There," he said, smugly pleased with himself, and I sat up and pushed him backwards the other way on the bed."
"It's a necromantic text; it's hideous. But I'd rather spend dead men twice than any more of the living."
"He [Marek] blazed with determination, with longing. His armor was washed with blood and smoke, his face smeared with one bright red streak, but he looked for a moment like a child, or maybe a saint, pure with want. And the queen looked at him, and put her hand on his chest, and killed him. [...] If there was anything left of Queen Hanna, any thin scraping of will, maybe she spent it then, on one small mercy: he died without knowing he'd failed. His face didn't change. [...] He fell to the floor on his back, his armor ringing on the flagstones, still clear-eyed and certain, certain he would be heard, certain he would be victorious. He looked like a king. || He'd cuaght us all in his own certainty. For a moment we were all shocked into stillness."
"There wasn't triumph in her face, only an unending wrath and the awareness of victory."
"Solya walked with me, giving me a hand occasionally over a particularly high mound of armored corpses. We hadn't taken him priosoner; he'd just followed us out, trailing after us with a puzzled look, like a man who knew he wasn't dreaming, but felt he should have been."
[The unfrozen soldiers] "edged back from us wide-eyed, but then they looked at Solya: they recognized him, at least. 'orders, sir?' one of them asked him, uncertainly. He stared back blankly a moment and then looked at us, just as uncertainly."
[Kasia] "pug her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me."
"I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me."
"[Stashek had] also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha's daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn't much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise."
"The sons stood in baffled silence, confused whether to grieve or not [that their father chose to remain inside a heart-tree]. 'He missed Mother,' the eldest said finally, and they all nodded."
"His mouth thinned with what I would have called displeasure, once, and now named prickly mortification."
I think Uprooted might turn out to be my Seraphina or The Goblin Emperor for the year -- it's not a book that I became obsessed with myself, but it's a book I'm looking forward to sharing with a lot of people, because I think a lot of people will enjoy it.
43. John Green, Paper Towns -- L and I seem to be mostly in agreement in our John Green book rankings (allowing for me not having read The Fault in Our Stars because I've reached a point in life where a) reading about cancer is not something I think I can enjoy and b) reading about children with terminal illnesses is DEFINITELY not something I want to do -- plus I'm just really not for tear-jerkers in general), and, as much as we'd looked forward to Paper Towns, we both agreed that it was our least favorite of his books. Which is not to say we disliked it -- we didn't. It just feels the least interesting and fresh to me/us. Spoilers!
I think part of it is that we read it too close to Looking for Alaska, and while I've heard the argument that Paper Towns is meant as a deconstruction of the kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl character that Alaska is sometimes accused of being, I actually thought Alaska was a *better* deconstruction of that trope. Alaska, for me, was a fairly nuanced book ruined by the very end, the two pages of anvilicious essay. I appreciated the reduction in anviliciousness and Christian message in Paper Towns, but it still feels pretty didactic. Like, it's very clear in spelling out things, like Margo being a person capable of feeling fear and loneliness, not "a fine and precious thing" or a "miracle", which is maybe useful to teenagers, but I felt like Alaska was making most of the same points, just more subtly.
A bigger problem for me, though, was simply that this was my least favorite set of characters yet. I can't say I found Miles a compelling character or protagonist, either, but I'd liked him a lot more than I liked Q. Alaska was more interesting than Margo. And I had liked the Colonel a lot, while Q's friends didn't really grab me. I mean, I liked Radar, but the book spent less time on him than on Ben, whom I just disliked. There's the whole message about Quentin learning to accept Ben for who he is, but I just found Ben annoying, no acceptance required. And Lacey was somebody who I thought could be an interesting character, but I didn't feel like she got enough time to develop properly. I did like her confrontation with Margo at the end, though.
The set up of Quentin's fascination with Margo, their adventure together, and his search for her didn't really do much for me, but the roadtrip was pretty great. That was both L's and mine favorite part of the book, and I laughed out loud several times, at the whole thing with Ben peeing, and Q wanting to save the pee in a turquoise bottle because it was so pretty, and the thing with the accidental Confederate T-shirts. I bet this part is going to get expanded in the movie, isn't it? It's definitely the most cinamatic part of the book, but also the most fun, so I'm in favor of that. Oh, and Ben drunk at the prom party and Q's reactions as the only sober person were also quite funny, especially the beer sword. Oh, and the black Santas were funny, too.
Random note: It really annoyed me that "Omnictionary" was being used for what is clearly Wikipedia. I mean, why not just use the real name? Although the program Radar wrote is really cool, and I would like it to exist in real life please. On an equally random and nitpicky note, everybody's usernames/IM names are ridiculous.
Quotes:
"My mother worked with crazy teenagers in juvenile detention centers and prisons. I think that's why she never really worried about me -- as long as I wasn't ritually decapitating gerbils or urinating on my own face, she figured I was a success."
"I wanted Margo's disappearance to change me; but it hadn't, not really."
I said, "The very idea iss so offensive that it's actually illegal to say the words 'Ben Starling's tongue' on television."
"The penalty for vilating the law is either ten years in prison or one Ben Starling tongue bath,"Radar said.
"Everyone," I said.
"Chooses," Radar said, smiling.
"Prison," we finished together.
[Most of their trash-talking I didn't find that funny, but this made me LOL.]
"And Ben? Ben's role is to need to pee. At first it seems like his main role is going to be complaining about how we don't have any CDs and that all the radio stations in Orlando suck except for the college radio station, which is already out of range. But soon enough, he abandons that role for his true and faithful calling: needing to pee."
I read John Green's Q&A on the book after I finished my write-up, and, hm. I think part of my problem with it is that he very clearly and consciously wrote it in response to people not getting Alaska, and as somebody who feels like I got Alaska just fine, it seems like a lot of effort bursting through an open door. But I did like and find interesting what he had to say about the choice of Margo's name: that it's Margo because there's "go" in it, and Roth = red (for all the color symbolism in the book, which I didn't find very interesting, but anyway), and Spiegelman = mirror-maker. That last bit is especially cool.
As I look back over the book and what I've written, I actually liked a lot of it. Certain scenes worked well for me, I laughed, I thought several of Q's epiphanies about Margo and himself were well done. But... I don't know, it feels like the book is trying too hard, harder than it should, and while it's a fine book, it is, I don't know, overly earnest, overly eager to explain, not trusting the reader to make the connections himself and spelling things out? And that leaves an aftertaste I dislike...
44. John Green, An Abundance of Katherines -- this, conversely, is both L's and mine favorite of the John Green books. His books are very formulaic, I've noticed. I don't mean it as a criticism, exactly, but that makes them easy to compare to each other: you've got your protagonist (male in the cases of all the books I've read, though it's one of the things that makes me curious about FiOS; I really wonder how different it is when he's writing a female voice), your love interest (that he is probably obsessed with), and your best friend(s) characters for banter and comic relief. And there isn't so much in the way of plot as the protagonist's emotional journey, so even though the things that happen may be different, the underlying plot still feels the same.
Spoilers from here! If we look at the protagonists and compare them, Colin is my favorite. He is still pretty pathetic, but at least he's got some ambitions not tied to Katherines (unlike Quentin with his Margo obsession) and his interests are much wider and less shallow than Miles's last words thing. I still wouldn't want him as a boyfriend, but at least I wouldn't mind being Colin's friend, which is not something I could say for either Miles and Quentin. And the prodigy thing makes him interesting. (I also feel like it's pretty heavily implied that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum (high functioning, of course), with the inability to relate to stories and needing direct cues to know when he's boring people so he can learn to have a normal conversation (somebody apparently asked John Green about that, and his answer was "I’m a novelist, not a doctor, so I won’t attempt to diagnose any of my characters. But I was conscious of the way people on the autistic spectrum struggle to read certain social cues, and the way their brains process and store information."), which makes it easier for me to accept the sub-optimal things he does without being exasperated with him. (Quentin, for the record, is my least favorite, which, as I think I mentioned above, contributes heavily to Paper Towns being my least favorite book.)
I think it also helps that this book is not written in first person. I love first person narration, but it depends so heavily on the first person narrator being INTERESTING and fun to spend time with. Colin's narration would be very frustrating, probably, because of the way he makes connections, so this was a better choice. (After writing this, I read through Green's Q&A, and apparently he actually tried it in first person first, and it was just as confusing and frustrating as I expected) I also liked having the outside authorial look at Colin, fond but gently mocking a lot of the time -- I think I missed that with Miles and Quentin, where all of that had to come from other characters reading the protagonist lectures, which doesn't feel natural if done too often, so it wasn't. And I liked the footnotes -- the footnotes were cute!
Lindsay is also my favorite of the love interests, probably by virtue of not being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (which is a character type I find pretty boring, tbh) and being someone kind and pragmatic and having her own story that she was willing to share instead of having to be discovered or chases. The lack of pining was also refreshing; having Colin hung up on a *different* girl for most of the book was a very nice twist on the formula I mentioned above. Lindsay is ALSO someone I'd like to know in real life (although I'd be cringing continuously about her TOC choices, along with her mother), which was also not true of Margo and probably not-true of Alaska, who, while fascinating, seemed like too much trouble to want to deal with on a regular basis.
I think my favorite best-friend character is still the Colonel from Alaska, but Hassan is a close second. And, actually, in the other two books I felt like there was a best-friend character I liked and one I found extraneous or annoying, whereas here the extraneous/annoying one is eliminated, and Hassan is funny and feels like a character in his own right, with his own problems, ambitions (or lack thereof, if you don't count Judge Judy), views, and his own journey. I think because there was only one of him, he got more page time and so felt a lot more like a full-fledged character in his own right rather than a side-kick in Colin's story. And I liked the relationship between the two of them, the way they actually *talk* about their issues, and the whole "Dingleberries" safeword thing. (Hassan was L's favorite thing about the book, and her favorite best friend. She kept underlying things he said, and I did find them fairly funny in context.) And I do think it's cool that Hassan is a Muslim character who is neither dogmatic nor *just* about that, while still having his faith being something that's important to him (although, like most people, he is better at following some parts of it than others, sometimes for well thought out reasons, sometimes just because it's easier). I would totally be down to read a book with Hassan as a protagonist (which, apparently John Green has said that if he had to write a sequel to one of his books, like at gunpoint, it would probably involve Hassan.)
I also liked Hollis, Lindsay's mother, and having part of the plot be taken up with hearing people's stories made this book feel less... insular, I guess, than most of the other John Green books I've read, where everything is fixated on the protagonist (I think this is another case where non-first-person POV helped). Really, this is the only of the books where I finished it and still wanted to know what happened to these characters after, rather than feeling done with the protagonist's drama.
Oh, right, and the math! From the moment the math started appearing, I was wondering who was doing John Green's math for him, or if it was all him. Of course I read the math-only appendix, and while I didn't try to parse the forumla itself (too many variables), I liked that aspect of the book (although I did not find it super-believable that someone with as little interest in math-for-math's sake as Colin would want to come up with a formula as his great legacy -- even if he was better at math than a "regular" person). But, like, I've actually sketched out the happiness-vs-time graph of a relationship that he starts with, and have also had those conversations with people I was in a relationship with, so having a lot of the book be Colin thinking about that was really amusing to me.
There were only a few minor things that didn't work for me as well in this novel. The dialogue in the cave, especially the ellipses for silence, felt kinda hokey. Oh, and the "fugging" thing. It's explained in the book, but I didn't really buy the explanation, or, at least, I don't think the "fugging" adds much in the pure narrative sense, beyond avoiding a real F-word for logistics (school libraries or whatever) reasons.
Quotes:
"She [the child psychologist] asked him an endless string of wonderful questions, and Colin loved her for it. Up until that time, most of the questions [25 month old] Colin had been asked centered around whether or not he had pissed himself, or whether he could please eat one more bit of the miserable greenies."
"Colin didn't like coffee. He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot -- a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellecturals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile." [I'm kind of with him on this, along with his coping strategy.]
"'I try to use the remaining letters to make-- oh God, this is boring,' he said, hoping it wasn't."
"The oldest pictures were faded and yellowing, and Colin thought about how even in pictures of their your, old people looked old."
"He missed that [going to Northwestern together] and it hadn't even happened. He missed his imagined future."
"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."
"You fugging kissed a girl. A girl. I mean, I always sort of thought you were gay," Colin acknowledged.
"I might be gay if I had a better-looking best friend," said Hassan.
"Which was how he justified not mentioning the hog hunt to his parents during their nightly phone conversation. He wasn't really going on a hunt anyway. He was going for a stroll through the woods. With a gun."
Colin yelling at the rooster: "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO! HOW DO YOU LIKE IT FROM THE OTHER END, YOU LITTLE FUGGER?"
Katherine III to Colin: "'Okay, well, you take care of yourself' she said, the way you might say it to a schizophrenic homeless person to whom you've just given a dollar."
"The future will erase everything -- there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible" (which I actually do find kind of liberating as a thought)
Apparently Katherines is the worst selling of Green's books, like by a lot, which makes me a bit sad, but I suppose it's not surprising, given the math and the less "everyman" protagonist. But I like it a lot, and I'm glad it's L's favorite, too.
45. Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride -- L likes reading Sarah Dessen, but this was my first time trying one of her books. I picked it up from L's pile and the protagonist's name in the blurb drew my attention, as well as her background, so I tried the first page, and just kept reading. Also, I've come to the conclusion that Auden is actually a pretty cool girl's name. Spoilers!
I don't have a lot of profound things to say about this one, but I liked pretty much everything it set out to do with the YA girl-meets-boy formula. I liked both Auden and the love interest, Eli, and I thought the build of their relationship was nicely done, and while they did not always act in the most reasonable way, I didn't think the setbacks between them were manufactured or happened because they acted like idiots, which was quite refreshing. I was worried that Auden would learn A Very Important Lesson about what's truly meaningful in life, but thought that aspect was handled quite well -- she discovers there's life beyond academics, but her studies are clearly still important to her at the end. And I thought the lessons she learns about not dismissing "girlie girls" like Heidi and Maggie out of hand were handled pretty well. The stuff with Auden's mother was a bit more heavy-handed, but I did like their reconciliation, and the way everybody got, if not a happy ending, at least a shot at one. In general I liked the variety of female relationships in this book, and Auden herself is an interesting protagonist, the kind of character I haven't seen very often -- somebody very sure of her strengths but also willing to learn about her blindspots, with both the strengths and blindspots. And while there were parts of Auden's quest that were boring to me -- quite a few of them, food fight, bowling, etc. -- her voice made even those scenes quite readable.
Quotes:
"I was noticing that he [Auden's father] did this a lot, the half-sentence-railing-off thing, leaving you (or me, in this case) to finish his thought for him. It was like Mad Libs, but passive-aggressive."
"My little sister," [Auden's brother] said, shaking his head. "Staying out all night with a boy. Seems like just yesterday you were playing Barbies and skipping rope."
"Hollis, please," I said. "Mom considered Barbies weapons of chauvinism, and nobody's skipped rope since 1950."
I will probably be trying a couple of the other Dessen books L has lying around, although I do think this one was probably particularly well-suited to me by virtue of the protagonist and her parents.
*
No new bingo squares to report, but I'm in the middle of reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell for the unfinished/farthest shelf square (which should take care of one of the two remaining squares on the Mix'n'Match card, and net me two more bingos there), North and South (which should take care of the antonyms square), and Stranger (which should take care of the >2 protagonists one) and help with some Random card bingos.
I instantly clicked with Agnieszka's narrative voice, although it was rather odd to be reading Novik without the Victorian froufrous (I mean, I really enjoy the writing in Temeraire, too, and the style works very well for the story, but it was refreshing to be in Agnieszka's much more straightforward and pragmatic way of telling a story). I think Agnieszka herself is my favorite thing about the book -- she's such a fun heroine! down-to-earth and funny, with a bite when she loses her temper and a fond wryness about most things. And her story is neat, too, the trajectory from village girl who finds stuff in the forest to unexpected tribute to unusual witch to a young Baba Yaga figure of sorts. egelantier's review mentioned that despite the way the blurb made it sound, this book was a bildungsroman, but I did not realize it was leading up to Baba Yaga-ness -- that's pretty awesome!
What the blurb makes it sound like as a Beauty-and-the-Beast story between Agnieszka and the Dragon, and although there is a romance between them, it didn't feel like that at all. I liked the Dragon, too, but mostly I liked seeing him through Agnieszka's eyes: that fond wryness about his fussiness and his spluttering exasperation with her, and also the genuine admiration for the way he loves magic, and does the necessary, dangerous, self-sacrificing things with the same air of annoyance at the improper workings of the universe with which he puts up with Agnieszka's bungled spells. NGL, I found the UST between them really hot, although in retrospect it's probably not that surprising, given how much I love "Nice Work if You Can Get It", which is also about an unlooked-for relationship between a fussy book-learning sort of person and a wild natural talent of sorts, with "the robots made them do it" in place of "magic made them do it". But anyway. I liked Agnieszka's relationship with the Dragon, and I also really liked that it wasn't the most important thing in this book, not by a long shot, and probably not even in the top 3 (the top 3 being stopping the Wood from destroying her valley, saving her best friend, and coming into her own power, I would say). I liked that I wasn't sure, until the very end, that the Dragon *would* come back, and really liked it that he did. Also, the scene where, in order to save Agnieszka, he drinks from the river water and thus binds himself to the valley in a way he has been resisting for decades really worked for me, and made me think of a similar scene in Tigana which does not -- this one felt earned and in character, unlike that one.
Another thing I really liked about this book were the antagonists. The book is very fairy-tale like in its magic and narrative, and it would've been easy to end up with black and white morality, but there's actually the opposite of that. While I enjoyed Agnieszka the narrator more, I think the thing I found the most interesting about it was Marek. He's such a fascinating character, in the way the narrative treats him, a really neat deconstruction of a fairytale hero-prince. We first hear about him as a hero, first meet him as a would-be rapist, he leads countless men to their deaths with very little thought and no enchantment on him, and yet... Agnieszka, who is very well aware of all these things, is still swayed by his charisma at times, and not wholly unsympathetic to the orphaned little boy still hoping to rescue his mother from 20 years of captivity in the Wood. He looks like a hero, he looks like a king, even in death and failure. I really liked what the story did with him. I also liked Solya, who seems to be completely amoral and thus a first-rate survivor, but who cannot be entirely dismissed because he is also really good at his chosen field of magic. And the Wood itself, of course, the primary villain, and the Queen at the heart of it gets her story and motivation, too, and her closure and healing at last. As I said somewhere else in a comment, I really liked all the shades of grey -- with Marek, who dies looking like a king, undisillusioned, after spending the lives of 6000+ men in vain, with the Wood-Queen, who finally finds peace despite all the terrible things she's done. It's all very neatly done.
Alosha the sword-mistress wizard and the Vlad, the Baron of Yellow River were interesting characters, too. And I actually wish there had been more about Kasia, who gets a very interesting arc of her own. I kind of want to read a sequel about Kasia the boy-king's champion.
Also, I should mention that the story felt authentically Slavic to me. I don't think it's even the names so much as something about the cadence -- it just felt right, the right down-to-earth kind of story, characters caring about the right sort of things. It actually reminded me of Gromyko's fantasy quite a bit, the early Volha books and even the beginning of God Krysy, which felt fitting. And the grounded fairy-tale feel also reminded me of McKinley. I wouldn't have associated Novik with either of those authors before, but this book reminded me of the things I like best about them, so, that's a very good thing.
Quotes (a lot of these, because I really liked the writing):
"I know I'm making her [Kasia] sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her."
"I think he would have liked to loom over me, and because he couldn't was even more angry."
"if only he hadn't just twitted me for being a rag, the way everyone who loved me did, but with malice instead of affection"
"I was a glaring blot on the perfection [of the Tower[. But I didn't care: I didn't feel I owed him beauty."
"I'd helped at butchering time, held the bucket for the pig's blood, but the thought of putting a knife into a man was something else, unimaginable. So I didn't imagine it. I only put the knife on the tray, and went upstairs."
"As strange as it may sound, I wasn't only afraid of what would happen to me [if Prince Marek died after she bludgeoned him]; I didn't want the prince to die. He was still half in my head as the shining hero of legend, all confusedly tangled up with the beast who'd just been pawing at me."
"He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmer--'My father's a woodcutter,' I said--'Of axe-swinging lummocks!' he snarled."
"I wasn't sure if I'd done her [the wife of a man corrupted by the Wood] any real kindness, or only spared myself pain" [with the time-stopping spell]
"That's nonsense," he said, almost plaitively, and stared down at his own arm with an air of frustration: as though he would rather have the corruption back, instead of having to consider that he might be wrong.
On Jaga's magic: "I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of forest that I had never seen before, and her words were like another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope [...] She didn't care how I got to the blueberries: she only pointed me in the proper direction and let me wander my way over to them, feeling out the ground beneath my feet."
"He hated it so very much I almost felt sorry for him."
"I must give him this credit: he sulked for the rest of the week, and then he dug out a small collection of other spellbooks from his shelves, to advise me in my blundering through my new forest, though it was foreign country to him. He did still resent my success, not from jealousy but as a matter of principle: it offended his sense of the proper order of things that my slapdash workings did work"
"I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around."
"She[Kasia]'d hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn't set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn't forced me to go three hours' walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. [...] My mother hand't brushed my hair three hundred strokes a night, keeping me beautiful, as though she wanted me taken; as though she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her borthers and sisters, the ones she let herlsef love"
"she'd even hated me for being taken. She hadn't been chosen after all. I saw her sitting at the feast afterwards, out of place [...] she had never imaginged herself here, left behind in a village, in a house that hadn't meant to welcome her back."
"I suppose it might seem strange that I should thank him by shouting at him, but it meant more than thanks: I wanted him to be human."
"You'd have to put them [the warhorses] all down after this in any case."
"These are trained warhorses! They're worth their weight in silver."
"And purging elixir is worth their weight in gold," the Dragon said. "If you felt tender towards them, you shouldn't have brought them into the Wood. But don't distress yourself overly. Chances are the question won't arise."
"I vomited on the grass. 'Not now!' the Dragon shouted at me, as though I could help it."
"I had always been dubious of war stories, songs of battle: the occasional fights between boys in the village square had always ended in mud and bloody noses and clawing, snot and tears, nothing graceful or glorious, and I didn't see how adding swords and death to the mix could make it any better. But I couldn't have imagined the horror of this."
"I would have thought any one of them [the chairs in a waiting room] a throne, if there hadn't been four in a row."
Marek, on his mother: "His beautiful wife, who ran away from him with a Rosyan boy who sang her charming songs in the garden. That's what they said of her, until I was old enough to kill men for saying it."
"'Listen, Nieshka--' I glared at him [Marek] speechlessly; how dare he put a pet name on me?"
"'Did Uncle Marek try to have us killed? I'm not a child,' he [Prince Stashek] added, looking at my face, as if I needed him to say so, when he'd just asked me such a thing."
Sarkan to Agnieszka: "Stop. I don't know how you've done any of this, and I imagine I'll be appalled when I learn, but you've been too profligate with your magic for one hour."
"I was glad to hear them name Alosha a traitor: maybe that meant she was still alive."
"But that [the attack] almost made the baron's soldiers happier. They stopped watching me and Sarkan like we were poisonous snakes, and began comfortably bawling out orders and making siege-preparations, work they all plainly knew well."
"There," he said, smugly pleased with himself, and I sat up and pushed him backwards the other way on the bed."
"It's a necromantic text; it's hideous. But I'd rather spend dead men twice than any more of the living."
"He [Marek] blazed with determination, with longing. His armor was washed with blood and smoke, his face smeared with one bright red streak, but he looked for a moment like a child, or maybe a saint, pure with want. And the queen looked at him, and put her hand on his chest, and killed him. [...] If there was anything left of Queen Hanna, any thin scraping of will, maybe she spent it then, on one small mercy: he died without knowing he'd failed. His face didn't change. [...] He fell to the floor on his back, his armor ringing on the flagstones, still clear-eyed and certain, certain he would be heard, certain he would be victorious. He looked like a king. || He'd cuaght us all in his own certainty. For a moment we were all shocked into stillness."
"There wasn't triumph in her face, only an unending wrath and the awareness of victory."
"Solya walked with me, giving me a hand occasionally over a particularly high mound of armored corpses. We hadn't taken him priosoner; he'd just followed us out, trailing after us with a puzzled look, like a man who knew he wasn't dreaming, but felt he should have been."
[The unfrozen soldiers] "edged back from us wide-eyed, but then they looked at Solya: they recognized him, at least. 'orders, sir?' one of them asked him, uncertainly. He stared back blankly a moment and then looked at us, just as uncertainly."
[Kasia] "pug her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me."
"I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me."
"[Stashek had] also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha's daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn't much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise."
"The sons stood in baffled silence, confused whether to grieve or not [that their father chose to remain inside a heart-tree]. 'He missed Mother,' the eldest said finally, and they all nodded."
"His mouth thinned with what I would have called displeasure, once, and now named prickly mortification."
I think Uprooted might turn out to be my Seraphina or The Goblin Emperor for the year -- it's not a book that I became obsessed with myself, but it's a book I'm looking forward to sharing with a lot of people, because I think a lot of people will enjoy it.
43. John Green, Paper Towns -- L and I seem to be mostly in agreement in our John Green book rankings (allowing for me not having read The Fault in Our Stars because I've reached a point in life where a) reading about cancer is not something I think I can enjoy and b) reading about children with terminal illnesses is DEFINITELY not something I want to do -- plus I'm just really not for tear-jerkers in general), and, as much as we'd looked forward to Paper Towns, we both agreed that it was our least favorite of his books. Which is not to say we disliked it -- we didn't. It just feels the least interesting and fresh to me/us. Spoilers!
I think part of it is that we read it too close to Looking for Alaska, and while I've heard the argument that Paper Towns is meant as a deconstruction of the kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl character that Alaska is sometimes accused of being, I actually thought Alaska was a *better* deconstruction of that trope. Alaska, for me, was a fairly nuanced book ruined by the very end, the two pages of anvilicious essay. I appreciated the reduction in anviliciousness and Christian message in Paper Towns, but it still feels pretty didactic. Like, it's very clear in spelling out things, like Margo being a person capable of feeling fear and loneliness, not "a fine and precious thing" or a "miracle", which is maybe useful to teenagers, but I felt like Alaska was making most of the same points, just more subtly.
A bigger problem for me, though, was simply that this was my least favorite set of characters yet. I can't say I found Miles a compelling character or protagonist, either, but I'd liked him a lot more than I liked Q. Alaska was more interesting than Margo. And I had liked the Colonel a lot, while Q's friends didn't really grab me. I mean, I liked Radar, but the book spent less time on him than on Ben, whom I just disliked. There's the whole message about Quentin learning to accept Ben for who he is, but I just found Ben annoying, no acceptance required. And Lacey was somebody who I thought could be an interesting character, but I didn't feel like she got enough time to develop properly. I did like her confrontation with Margo at the end, though.
The set up of Quentin's fascination with Margo, their adventure together, and his search for her didn't really do much for me, but the roadtrip was pretty great. That was both L's and mine favorite part of the book, and I laughed out loud several times, at the whole thing with Ben peeing, and Q wanting to save the pee in a turquoise bottle because it was so pretty, and the thing with the accidental Confederate T-shirts. I bet this part is going to get expanded in the movie, isn't it? It's definitely the most cinamatic part of the book, but also the most fun, so I'm in favor of that. Oh, and Ben drunk at the prom party and Q's reactions as the only sober person were also quite funny, especially the beer sword. Oh, and the black Santas were funny, too.
Random note: It really annoyed me that "Omnictionary" was being used for what is clearly Wikipedia. I mean, why not just use the real name? Although the program Radar wrote is really cool, and I would like it to exist in real life please. On an equally random and nitpicky note, everybody's usernames/IM names are ridiculous.
Quotes:
"My mother worked with crazy teenagers in juvenile detention centers and prisons. I think that's why she never really worried about me -- as long as I wasn't ritually decapitating gerbils or urinating on my own face, she figured I was a success."
"I wanted Margo's disappearance to change me; but it hadn't, not really."
I said, "The very idea iss so offensive that it's actually illegal to say the words 'Ben Starling's tongue' on television."
"The penalty for vilating the law is either ten years in prison or one Ben Starling tongue bath,"Radar said.
"Everyone," I said.
"Chooses," Radar said, smiling.
"Prison," we finished together.
[Most of their trash-talking I didn't find that funny, but this made me LOL.]
"And Ben? Ben's role is to need to pee. At first it seems like his main role is going to be complaining about how we don't have any CDs and that all the radio stations in Orlando suck except for the college radio station, which is already out of range. But soon enough, he abandons that role for his true and faithful calling: needing to pee."
I read John Green's Q&A on the book after I finished my write-up, and, hm. I think part of my problem with it is that he very clearly and consciously wrote it in response to people not getting Alaska, and as somebody who feels like I got Alaska just fine, it seems like a lot of effort bursting through an open door. But I did like and find interesting what he had to say about the choice of Margo's name: that it's Margo because there's "go" in it, and Roth = red (for all the color symbolism in the book, which I didn't find very interesting, but anyway), and Spiegelman = mirror-maker. That last bit is especially cool.
As I look back over the book and what I've written, I actually liked a lot of it. Certain scenes worked well for me, I laughed, I thought several of Q's epiphanies about Margo and himself were well done. But... I don't know, it feels like the book is trying too hard, harder than it should, and while it's a fine book, it is, I don't know, overly earnest, overly eager to explain, not trusting the reader to make the connections himself and spelling things out? And that leaves an aftertaste I dislike...
44. John Green, An Abundance of Katherines -- this, conversely, is both L's and mine favorite of the John Green books. His books are very formulaic, I've noticed. I don't mean it as a criticism, exactly, but that makes them easy to compare to each other: you've got your protagonist (male in the cases of all the books I've read, though it's one of the things that makes me curious about FiOS; I really wonder how different it is when he's writing a female voice), your love interest (that he is probably obsessed with), and your best friend(s) characters for banter and comic relief. And there isn't so much in the way of plot as the protagonist's emotional journey, so even though the things that happen may be different, the underlying plot still feels the same.
Spoilers from here! If we look at the protagonists and compare them, Colin is my favorite. He is still pretty pathetic, but at least he's got some ambitions not tied to Katherines (unlike Quentin with his Margo obsession) and his interests are much wider and less shallow than Miles's last words thing. I still wouldn't want him as a boyfriend, but at least I wouldn't mind being Colin's friend, which is not something I could say for either Miles and Quentin. And the prodigy thing makes him interesting. (I also feel like it's pretty heavily implied that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum (high functioning, of course), with the inability to relate to stories and needing direct cues to know when he's boring people so he can learn to have a normal conversation (somebody apparently asked John Green about that, and his answer was "I’m a novelist, not a doctor, so I won’t attempt to diagnose any of my characters. But I was conscious of the way people on the autistic spectrum struggle to read certain social cues, and the way their brains process and store information."), which makes it easier for me to accept the sub-optimal things he does without being exasperated with him. (Quentin, for the record, is my least favorite, which, as I think I mentioned above, contributes heavily to Paper Towns being my least favorite book.)
I think it also helps that this book is not written in first person. I love first person narration, but it depends so heavily on the first person narrator being INTERESTING and fun to spend time with. Colin's narration would be very frustrating, probably, because of the way he makes connections, so this was a better choice. (After writing this, I read through Green's Q&A, and apparently he actually tried it in first person first, and it was just as confusing and frustrating as I expected) I also liked having the outside authorial look at Colin, fond but gently mocking a lot of the time -- I think I missed that with Miles and Quentin, where all of that had to come from other characters reading the protagonist lectures, which doesn't feel natural if done too often, so it wasn't. And I liked the footnotes -- the footnotes were cute!
Lindsay is also my favorite of the love interests, probably by virtue of not being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (which is a character type I find pretty boring, tbh) and being someone kind and pragmatic and having her own story that she was willing to share instead of having to be discovered or chases. The lack of pining was also refreshing; having Colin hung up on a *different* girl for most of the book was a very nice twist on the formula I mentioned above. Lindsay is ALSO someone I'd like to know in real life (although I'd be cringing continuously about her TOC choices, along with her mother), which was also not true of Margo and probably not-true of Alaska, who, while fascinating, seemed like too much trouble to want to deal with on a regular basis.
I think my favorite best-friend character is still the Colonel from Alaska, but Hassan is a close second. And, actually, in the other two books I felt like there was a best-friend character I liked and one I found extraneous or annoying, whereas here the extraneous/annoying one is eliminated, and Hassan is funny and feels like a character in his own right, with his own problems, ambitions (or lack thereof, if you don't count Judge Judy), views, and his own journey. I think because there was only one of him, he got more page time and so felt a lot more like a full-fledged character in his own right rather than a side-kick in Colin's story. And I liked the relationship between the two of them, the way they actually *talk* about their issues, and the whole "Dingleberries" safeword thing. (Hassan was L's favorite thing about the book, and her favorite best friend. She kept underlying things he said, and I did find them fairly funny in context.) And I do think it's cool that Hassan is a Muslim character who is neither dogmatic nor *just* about that, while still having his faith being something that's important to him (although, like most people, he is better at following some parts of it than others, sometimes for well thought out reasons, sometimes just because it's easier). I would totally be down to read a book with Hassan as a protagonist (which, apparently John Green has said that if he had to write a sequel to one of his books, like at gunpoint, it would probably involve Hassan.)
I also liked Hollis, Lindsay's mother, and having part of the plot be taken up with hearing people's stories made this book feel less... insular, I guess, than most of the other John Green books I've read, where everything is fixated on the protagonist (I think this is another case where non-first-person POV helped). Really, this is the only of the books where I finished it and still wanted to know what happened to these characters after, rather than feeling done with the protagonist's drama.
Oh, right, and the math! From the moment the math started appearing, I was wondering who was doing John Green's math for him, or if it was all him. Of course I read the math-only appendix, and while I didn't try to parse the forumla itself (too many variables), I liked that aspect of the book (although I did not find it super-believable that someone with as little interest in math-for-math's sake as Colin would want to come up with a formula as his great legacy -- even if he was better at math than a "regular" person). But, like, I've actually sketched out the happiness-vs-time graph of a relationship that he starts with, and have also had those conversations with people I was in a relationship with, so having a lot of the book be Colin thinking about that was really amusing to me.
There were only a few minor things that didn't work for me as well in this novel. The dialogue in the cave, especially the ellipses for silence, felt kinda hokey. Oh, and the "fugging" thing. It's explained in the book, but I didn't really buy the explanation, or, at least, I don't think the "fugging" adds much in the pure narrative sense, beyond avoiding a real F-word for logistics (school libraries or whatever) reasons.
Quotes:
"She [the child psychologist] asked him an endless string of wonderful questions, and Colin loved her for it. Up until that time, most of the questions [25 month old] Colin had been asked centered around whether or not he had pissed himself, or whether he could please eat one more bit of the miserable greenies."
"Colin didn't like coffee. He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot -- a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellecturals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile." [I'm kind of with him on this, along with his coping strategy.]
"'I try to use the remaining letters to make-- oh God, this is boring,' he said, hoping it wasn't."
"The oldest pictures were faded and yellowing, and Colin thought about how even in pictures of their your, old people looked old."
"He missed that [going to Northwestern together] and it hadn't even happened. He missed his imagined future."
"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."
"You fugging kissed a girl. A girl. I mean, I always sort of thought you were gay," Colin acknowledged.
"I might be gay if I had a better-looking best friend," said Hassan.
"Which was how he justified not mentioning the hog hunt to his parents during their nightly phone conversation. He wasn't really going on a hunt anyway. He was going for a stroll through the woods. With a gun."
Colin yelling at the rooster: "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO! HOW DO YOU LIKE IT FROM THE OTHER END, YOU LITTLE FUGGER?"
Katherine III to Colin: "'Okay, well, you take care of yourself' she said, the way you might say it to a schizophrenic homeless person to whom you've just given a dollar."
"The future will erase everything -- there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible" (which I actually do find kind of liberating as a thought)
Apparently Katherines is the worst selling of Green's books, like by a lot, which makes me a bit sad, but I suppose it's not surprising, given the math and the less "everyman" protagonist. But I like it a lot, and I'm glad it's L's favorite, too.
45. Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride -- L likes reading Sarah Dessen, but this was my first time trying one of her books. I picked it up from L's pile and the protagonist's name in the blurb drew my attention, as well as her background, so I tried the first page, and just kept reading. Also, I've come to the conclusion that Auden is actually a pretty cool girl's name. Spoilers!
I don't have a lot of profound things to say about this one, but I liked pretty much everything it set out to do with the YA girl-meets-boy formula. I liked both Auden and the love interest, Eli, and I thought the build of their relationship was nicely done, and while they did not always act in the most reasonable way, I didn't think the setbacks between them were manufactured or happened because they acted like idiots, which was quite refreshing. I was worried that Auden would learn A Very Important Lesson about what's truly meaningful in life, but thought that aspect was handled quite well -- she discovers there's life beyond academics, but her studies are clearly still important to her at the end. And I thought the lessons she learns about not dismissing "girlie girls" like Heidi and Maggie out of hand were handled pretty well. The stuff with Auden's mother was a bit more heavy-handed, but I did like their reconciliation, and the way everybody got, if not a happy ending, at least a shot at one. In general I liked the variety of female relationships in this book, and Auden herself is an interesting protagonist, the kind of character I haven't seen very often -- somebody very sure of her strengths but also willing to learn about her blindspots, with both the strengths and blindspots. And while there were parts of Auden's quest that were boring to me -- quite a few of them, food fight, bowling, etc. -- her voice made even those scenes quite readable.
Quotes:
"I was noticing that he [Auden's father] did this a lot, the half-sentence-railing-off thing, leaving you (or me, in this case) to finish his thought for him. It was like Mad Libs, but passive-aggressive."
"My little sister," [Auden's brother] said, shaking his head. "Staying out all night with a boy. Seems like just yesterday you were playing Barbies and skipping rope."
"Hollis, please," I said. "Mom considered Barbies weapons of chauvinism, and nobody's skipped rope since 1950."
I will probably be trying a couple of the other Dessen books L has lying around, although I do think this one was probably particularly well-suited to me by virtue of the protagonist and her parents.
*
No new bingo squares to report, but I'm in the middle of reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell for the unfinished/farthest shelf square (which should take care of one of the two remaining squares on the Mix'n'Match card, and net me two more bingos there), North and South (which should take care of the antonyms square), and Stranger (which should take care of the >2 protagonists one) and help with some Random card bingos.