Reading: Dubosarsky
I finally forced myself to finish Ursula Dubosarsky's Abysinnia, which I had begun weeks ago, and set aside because this is just not a children's book--nor is it (to me) satisfying as an adult novel.
But I got an elbow-nudge from X who insists on its brilliance, so I pulled it back down and got to work. And it was work. Well, maybe it is brilliant for a reader more sophisticated than I (not at all hard to find) but for me it was a failure, though a beautifully written failure. Wow, gorgeous prose. But a fractured story heavy on the symbolism with fractured people in a fractured situation that would make no sense whatsoever to kid readers--and this adult reader, anyway, has seen the central idea done before, several times, and much more engagingly. There was one, long forgotten now, called Loretta Mason Potts by Mary Chase, that did lost children and dolls and magic and everything better, except it was not written in this consciously metaphorical prose.
But I got an elbow-nudge from X who insists on its brilliance, so I pulled it back down and got to work. And it was work. Well, maybe it is brilliant for a reader more sophisticated than I (not at all hard to find) but for me it was a failure, though a beautifully written failure. Wow, gorgeous prose. But a fractured story heavy on the symbolism with fractured people in a fractured situation that would make no sense whatsoever to kid readers--and this adult reader, anyway, has seen the central idea done before, several times, and much more engagingly. There was one, long forgotten now, called Loretta Mason Potts by Mary Chase, that did lost children and dolls and magic and everything better, except it was not written in this consciously metaphorical prose.