Books (Jan 2014)
Um, hi! Fell into the black hole again...slowly crawling my way back out. Didn't do a lot of reading, unfortunately, but at least it made writing this post manageable!
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers by Valerie Lawson
The Last Forever by Deb Caletti
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (YA)
I enjoyed this - in fact, stayed up reading it even though I knew I should've been in bed asleep - which is a key point to why I would've identified with Cath in the first place. It comes with a healthy dollop of wish fulfilment - which fannish shut-in *doesn't* wish for their dream person to fall into their laps and love their crazy internet behaviours - but it's charming and sweet and somehow quite fully realised in its internal logic that I was easily swept along in it.
On waking up in the morning I did have a few more questions and doubts: Wren's characterisation is all over the place and seems mostly to serve the story, I'm still on the fence about the things we DON'T get to see like the end of Carry On, Simon and the 8th Simon Snow book and HOW Cath comes to write her award-winning original work. Not to mention, as others have expressed better, that Cath's experience of fandom seems surprisingly (and maybe unrealistically?) lonely - she seems bemused by fannish interaction offline but just as detached online, and I've never really come across a BNF who could maintain their reputation without being heavily involved in the non-fic-writing part/socialising. But I liked so many of these characters, and even though it's not my experience of fandom parts of it resonated all the same.
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers by Valerie Lawson (biography)
As a lifelong fan of Mary Poppins - the film was my favourite as a five-year-old, and the books even more so as a eight-year-old - I appreciated the deep dive into the long life of P.L. Travers who first brought her to life on the page, even as I found it difficult at times to keep reading as Travers is revealed to be a prickly, difficult person, somewhat self-obsessed, needy and often tiresome to the people in her life.
Lawson draws on plenty of biographical material to develop thematic arcs within Travers' life and her writing. She spends a great deal of energy and time on the 'search for Mr Banks', exploring the platonic relationships Travers had with a long line of charismatic, ultimately disappointing, avuncular father figures slash devotees, as well as her own obsession with a number of not-that-interesting spiritual advisers. However, there are gaps, stories not quite explored, in trying to understand Travers' lifelong antipathy towards most of the women in her life, from her intense, doomed, likely lesbian romantic relationships, to those with the coolly distant women who raised her, with her sisters, and the lack thereof with the girls at the various colleges she spent time as writer-in-residence.
Truth be told, I had to put this down a few times as I was reading, and found it a bit of a slog to finish towards the end. Not because of the writing per se (though it didn't help when Lawson conscientiously went off on related tangents about the new age gurus that dominated much of Travers' later life) but because Travers is, often, an unlikeable subject. And yet, she lived an interesting life, to be sure.
I also went back and reread the first Mary Poppins book, and it was just as charming and delightful as I remembered. And in light of the biography, it was both possible AND difficult to relate the funny, not-always-lovely creation of Mary Poppins with the creative, prickly woman behind her.
The Last Forever by Deb Caletti (YA)
I really like Caletti's writing, her ability to draw sympathetic teenage girls at the centres of her narratives, and the difficult family relationships that drive us crazy but that we could never do without. Here, it's between Tess and her somewhat strange dad and her estranged grandmother Jenny; and between Tess and her new, dizzying crush Henry Lark and his quirky friends in the small town she's been exiled to. Real families AND found families? Oh I could've been a mess at the end of this book if I was a little less cynical. The idea of the seedbank, and the plot involving Pix the mystery plant, was lovely, but was the seed metaphor pushed a little too hard and did it become a little on the nose? Yeah. Was the book charming and touching and lovely all the same? Yep!
I do feel a bit cheated in the characters of Elijah and Millicent, who have a big role to play in the emotional climax of this story, but are thinly drawn and too much like caricatures for me to enjoy; and once their part in the plot revelation is done, they're completely thrown by the wayside, which undermines Henry's story a little. Ultimately, despite my misgivings I still really enjoyed the read, and I would read another Caletti - she's somewhat taken over the space in my YA heart that used to belong to Sarah Dessen.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers by Valerie Lawson
The Last Forever by Deb Caletti
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (YA)
I enjoyed this - in fact, stayed up reading it even though I knew I should've been in bed asleep - which is a key point to why I would've identified with Cath in the first place. It comes with a healthy dollop of wish fulfilment - which fannish shut-in *doesn't* wish for their dream person to fall into their laps and love their crazy internet behaviours - but it's charming and sweet and somehow quite fully realised in its internal logic that I was easily swept along in it.
On waking up in the morning I did have a few more questions and doubts: Wren's characterisation is all over the place and seems mostly to serve the story, I'm still on the fence about the things we DON'T get to see like the end of Carry On, Simon and the 8th Simon Snow book and HOW Cath comes to write her award-winning original work. Not to mention, as others have expressed better, that Cath's experience of fandom seems surprisingly (and maybe unrealistically?) lonely - she seems bemused by fannish interaction offline but just as detached online, and I've never really come across a BNF who could maintain their reputation without being heavily involved in the non-fic-writing part/socialising. But I liked so many of these characters, and even though it's not my experience of fandom parts of it resonated all the same.
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers by Valerie Lawson (biography)
As a lifelong fan of Mary Poppins - the film was my favourite as a five-year-old, and the books even more so as a eight-year-old - I appreciated the deep dive into the long life of P.L. Travers who first brought her to life on the page, even as I found it difficult at times to keep reading as Travers is revealed to be a prickly, difficult person, somewhat self-obsessed, needy and often tiresome to the people in her life.
Lawson draws on plenty of biographical material to develop thematic arcs within Travers' life and her writing. She spends a great deal of energy and time on the 'search for Mr Banks', exploring the platonic relationships Travers had with a long line of charismatic, ultimately disappointing, avuncular father figures slash devotees, as well as her own obsession with a number of not-that-interesting spiritual advisers. However, there are gaps, stories not quite explored, in trying to understand Travers' lifelong antipathy towards most of the women in her life, from her intense, doomed, likely lesbian romantic relationships, to those with the coolly distant women who raised her, with her sisters, and the lack thereof with the girls at the various colleges she spent time as writer-in-residence.
Truth be told, I had to put this down a few times as I was reading, and found it a bit of a slog to finish towards the end. Not because of the writing per se (though it didn't help when Lawson conscientiously went off on related tangents about the new age gurus that dominated much of Travers' later life) but because Travers is, often, an unlikeable subject. And yet, she lived an interesting life, to be sure.
I also went back and reread the first Mary Poppins book, and it was just as charming and delightful as I remembered. And in light of the biography, it was both possible AND difficult to relate the funny, not-always-lovely creation of Mary Poppins with the creative, prickly woman behind her.
The Last Forever by Deb Caletti (YA)
I really like Caletti's writing, her ability to draw sympathetic teenage girls at the centres of her narratives, and the difficult family relationships that drive us crazy but that we could never do without. Here, it's between Tess and her somewhat strange dad and her estranged grandmother Jenny; and between Tess and her new, dizzying crush Henry Lark and his quirky friends in the small town she's been exiled to. Real families AND found families? Oh I could've been a mess at the end of this book if I was a little less cynical. The idea of the seedbank, and the plot involving Pix the mystery plant, was lovely, but was the seed metaphor pushed a little too hard and did it become a little on the nose? Yeah. Was the book charming and touching and lovely all the same? Yep!
I do feel a bit cheated in the characters of Elijah and Millicent, who have a big role to play in the emotional climax of this story, but are thinly drawn and too much like caricatures for me to enjoy; and once their part in the plot revelation is done, they're completely thrown by the wayside, which undermines Henry's story a little. Ultimately, despite my misgivings I still really enjoyed the read, and I would read another Caletti - she's somewhat taken over the space in my YA heart that used to belong to Sarah Dessen.