Recently read children's fiction

I haven't yet had time to blog about some children's fiction that I read in the past year. The novels usually went up on the sidebar with no comment. Here are a few that I enjoyed, in no particular order. I wrote something similar, only a bit more streamlined, for the Cal English blog.

M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume I: The Pox Party, 2006

I described this book to my children's lit cohorts as "Johnny Tremain meets Vathek," and I stand by that description. Highly stylized, in pitch-perfect eighteenth-century prose, the novel follows a young boy in colonial New England who is highly educated, but who only learns the reality about his situation in the world once his formal education stops. I was rather blown away by this novel, in part because the technical mastery was so greatly superior to much children's fiction currently being published. I have not had a chance yet to read the second volume, which was just released in 2008. I did, however, read a bizarre hyper-satirical mystery novel by the same author, which I can only describe as Nancy Drew on McSweeney's. It exhibited the same stylistic mastery as Octavian Nothing, but was otherwise very different, and it was, like McSweeney's, irritating.

William Nicholson, The Wind on Fire trilogy, 2002-2004

This fantasy trilogy did something astonishing, namely it kept the parents alive (well, mostly) and unhated. The first book begins in a brave new dystopia, and the whole family is lovingly united in sticking it to the man, often in very satisfying ways. Sentimental at times, but also sweet, and there is a hilarious flying cat that makes up for quite a lot, to my mind.

Karen Karbo, Minerva Clark Gets a Clue, 2006

This appears to be a series, and I do not intend to read anything else in the series, but I found the first book quite amusing. Minerva Clark is an inquisitive middle schooler whose main guardians are her three older brothers, whom she unhesitatingly ranks by level of responsibility or flakiness. Minerva is a bit like Harriet the Spy, only she isn't neurotic. How can this be? Well, she's struck by lightning of course, and this causes her to lose her natural middle-school-girl self-loathing, astonishing the doctor. Very funny.

Mary Hoffman, City of Masks (2002), City of Stars (2003), City of Flowers (2005)

In the Stravaganza series, teenagers from present-day London are magically transported to Talia, the Renaissance Italy of a parallel universe. Hijinks ensue. I can see the City of X conceit getting a bit old (apparently there is another volume that hasn't made it to the Claremont Branch yet), but so far I've found Hoffman's world-building subtle and creative. The part that tickles me the most is the old man, William Dethridge, who comes from Renaissance England and speaks in early modern English, spelling and all. Hoffman has a good ear for this, and it amuses me that to the Talians Dethridge sounds normal, but to the English teenagers he sounds "old-timey."

Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted (1997), Fairest (2006), and The Two Princesses of Bamarre (2001)

My attempt to post on Levine a long time ago was derailed by my having read Jennifer Holm's Boston Jane in the same week; praise was naturally superseded by a rant. I expected to dislike Levine, owing to the fact that a bad-looking Disney film existed based on one of her novels. But in fact I think she's great. I've read some reviews suggesting that her characterization is lacking, and I think that might be right, but also a bit beside the point. These novels strike me as interesting and well considered thought experiments, performed by a smart woman, in how you could conceive of a genuinely feminist princess story. These three different novels are three different kinds of answers, and they each have their successes and failings, but they are all interesting, they all engage serious questions, and they are all deeply interested in language.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), Year of the Griffin (2000), Power of Three (2003), Eight Days of Luke (1975), Hexwood (2002)

Oh, so many Diana Wynne Jones novels. Dark Lord of Derkholm is a very funny satire on fantasy conventions; a world full of magic is forced to give guided fantasy tours, complete with a seductive enchantress and a Dark Lord. A misfit named Derk, father to a multispecies family, is selected to be Dark Lord one year, and the whole family has to band together to pull it off and try to get rid of the devastating, exploitative tours in the process. In Year of the Griffin, the sequel, Derk's griffin daughter Elda goes off to the university, which turns out to be an extremely bootleg affair, especially when several foreign nations turn their wrath upon said university, including a series of highly trained assassins. Elda and her friends save the day with the help of some hard-core studying. I love that the undisputed leader of this world is a snakelike elderly lady named Querida. Power of Three is more or less a medievalist fantasy, or at least so it seems until we learn more about the Giants and the reader is forced to totally reorient. Well done, with that classic tongue-in-cheek Diana Wynne Jones style. Eight Days of Luke and Hexwood are myth-related fantasies in the style of Fire and Hemlock, by which I mean the protagonist is a normal child who is forced to enter into the logic of mythology. Hexwood is by far the more complicated and trippy, since a good part of it takes place entirely out of chronological sequence.

Boston Jane: An American Girl

I recently read two works of fiction marketed toward girls, Jennifer L. Holm’s Boston Jane: An Adventure and Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre. Both were published in 2001 by Harper Collins. It is my understanding that Boston Jane is a series, and that Levine is working on a sequel to The Two Princesses of Bamarre.

The one thing these two books have in common is embroidery. I am serious; both protagonists are very good at embroidery. But in other respects they’re like night and day.

If you were to guess from the covers which one was the retch-worthily patriarchal of the two, you might have gone with the one that involved princesses. There is a long and shameful history of YA novels that make girls the protagonists primarily insofar as they put on male drag, embroidery and other needlework being a typical and convenient emblem of idle and worthless femininity (Tamora Pierce, I am looking at you).


You might also have thought that, Gail Carson Levine being a Disney sellout, she would surely be the patriarchal hack of the two.

But no.

When I picked up Boston Jane: An Adventure, with the drawing of a spunky girl ^TM on the cover and the subtitle assuring us of said girl's spunkitude, I almost looked for an American Girls logo somewhere on the book, it was that evocative of the genre.

This should have tipped me off, but didn't, that I was in for a tiresome, awkwardly written tale that pays lip service to politically progressive values while keeping its real goal firmly in its sights, namely: to take a nineteenth century girl and make her stop kissing the patriarchy's rear end in nineteenth century ways in order to have her start kissing the patriarchy's rear in twenty-first century ways.

In the novel, Jane is raised by her father, a surgeon, since her mother has conveniently died in childbirth. Because there is no evil female taint in her life (except for Mrs. Parker, a servant who exists only to make cherry pies year round, since apparently Pennsylvania has an extraordinary cherry season), she grows up a healthy tomboy, spitting, slinging mud, and generally wishing she were Lyra from His Dark Materials. Jane remarks that during this period she thinks herself lucky, which is code for "masculine and therefore good."

Along comes Nellie Olsen Sally Biddle, who mocks Jane for her failure to perform femininity. This is the primal scene, so to speak, and at this point, Jane tells us, her luck runs out. Around the same time, Jane's father takes on a cute apprentice, William Baldt, who plays good cop to Sally's bad cop, gives Jane ribbons, and tells her to go to etiquette school.

Jane is quickly brainwashed by Miss Hepplewhite's Young Ladies’ Academy. Every possible trope is trotted out, including fancy embroidery and the corset, and of course the uselessness of everything that Jane learns at the academy. William approves of her progress and gives her hope that she will not be a social reject forever, while her father expresses scorn that Jane has stopped being interesting and has become useless and feminine.

Father, of course, believes that "you make your own luck," which is his way of saying that you are free to choose masculinity (all that is good and holy) even if you were born with a body that is socially constructed as feminine, and that Jane's oppression is therefore her own damn fault.

We are meant to see, of course, that the dear old patriarch is right and William is a jerk, but his total lack of empathy for Jane's position -- that if she continues to fail to perform femininity, she will be screwed as soon as her father is no longer there to shelter her -- merely reveals that Jane is caught between two misogynists: one who would manipulate her and shame her into performing femininity and rejecting her favorite pursuits, and one who despises all femininity and urgently wishes that Jane were a boy (with the attendant freedom to eschew femininity).

Eventually William heads west to make a fortune in timber, for which Father holds him in contempt. William writes letters to Jane and, when she is fifteen, proposes to her. This is repulsive, of course, but it will turn out later that he is a snake for other reasons, so apparently it is okay for this to go under the radar.

Jane talks her father into letting her go to Oregon to marry William, and he finally relents, although he warns Jane that William is an idiot. Of course, father is right about this.

After a two-month delay, Jane sails to Oregon with her Irish servant, Mary. Once Jane has learned a Very Special Lesson About Class from her, Mary kicks the bucket, enabling Jane to Grow.

When Jane gets to Shoalwater Bay, she is horrified to find that William is not there, that the place is thinly populated by crusty pioneer types and a quirky proto-anthropologist, and that she is surrounded by Savage Natives.

She does a fainty-haughty-lady routine, a caricature of the stereotypical silly Victorian lady, and much is made of her total uselessness. She pays a Chinook man to go find William, and meanwhile makes a life for herself. She eventually becomes spunky, and once a Chinook woman named Suis teaches her a Very Special Lesson About Race, Suis kicks the bucket, enabling Jane to Grow.

Jane is very conflicted about Not Being A Proper Lady Anymore, but in the end she rejects William, who is a racist and only wanted to marry Jane so he could get more land anyway, and Finds Herself. The end.

What raises my hackles so much about this book is the way it pats itself on the back for its supposedly conscientious treatment of race, class, and gender.

We are supposed to hate William and love Jane because William wants to put the Americans on reservations, while Jane wants to work and live with them in peace. But we know that actually, the Americans eventually were put on reservations, and that it doesn't matter how many spunky white girls are respectful of native Americans, since they can't vote anyway. And of course, once we have Learned A Lesson from Suis, she dies. We couldn't actually have a strong native woman survive. Why, she might compete with Jane's spunkiness!

Similarly, Mary is there to show that Jane's state as a lady is "useless" (ironically, since nineteenth century conduct manuals for middle class ladies emphasize usefulness -- usefulness to men, of course -- as the pinnacle of a woman's achievement; it is the aristocracy, which does not exist in Philadelphia, that is seen as useless). Once Mary is dead, Jane is free to raid her stash of recipes so she too can become useful. These "lessons" about race and class are here solely for the benefit of the privileged white woman.

And the novel's gender politics are the worst of all, because the novel makes the greatest claims for its gender politics. Mocked at the beginning of every chapter is a different one of Miss Hepplewhite's precepts for gracious middle-class femininity. But there is nothing particularly radical about mocking Victorian standards of middle-class femininity; very few people today think that fiercely adhering to the correct number of petticoats or always exclaiming about what is "proper" are reasonable priorities.

Jane reflects at the end of the novel that Miss Hepplewhite taught her to always perform passive femininity in order to be pleasing to men, but that it doesn't make sense for her to marry William or wear long dresses that restrict her movement. With her recuperated presexual tomboy masculinity, her luck has returned!

Well called? Oh, I think not: for it is not that Jane stops trying to please men at the end of the book, but that she starts to succeed at pleasing the right men (which, of course, includes her father).

Jane's father and the men she meets out west are therefore figures for modernity, but certainly not for women's liberation. Caricaturing Victorian femininity in order to have the protagonist reject it is cheap feminism, especially when it's just a means for Jane to become a spunky-but-nonthreatening woman, aspiring to masculinity (because, as the novel repeatedly assures us, femininity is useless and vapid) while never challenging the order that keeps men in power and defines femininity as worthless.

Sally Biddle, the great enforcer of feminine mores, is always seen as a villain, never a victim, and all sympathetic and competent women except for Jane are killed off. There is no option of real female independence; it's just a matter of figuring out which men to serve (mend their clothes, make them pie, trade your most treasured asset for a canoe so you can financially rescue them, etc.).

Same patriarchy, different dudes, and the fact that they aren't making Jane wear a corset doesn't mean they don't still hold her in disdain for being a woman.

I meant to write about The Two Princesses of Bamarre today, but I think that's enough book-reviewing for now.