To give you some time to navigate away, here’s the publisher’s writeup on Wildthorn:

They strip her naked, of everything—undo her whalebone corset, hook by hook. Locked away in Wildthorn Hall—a madhouse—they take her identity. She is now called Lucy Childs. She has no one; she has nothing. But, she is still seventeen—still Louisa Cosgrove, isn’t she? Who has done this unthinkable deed? Louisa must free herself, in more ways than one, and muster up the courage to be her true self, all the while solving her own twisted mystery and falling into an unconventional love . . .  Originally published in the UK, this well-paced, provocative romance pushes on boundaries—both literal and figurative—and, do beware: it will bind you, too.

This book is set in the 19th century, an era when organised ‘asylums’ became quite popular as places for locking people away; in addition to providing a dumping ground for people with mental illness, an ancient practice, they also offered ‘treatment’ to their inmates. Many of these institutions had horrific and appalling conditions and their inmates were just as likely to be unwanted single women of the family or rebellious women who didn’t obey as they were to have genuine mental illnesses. Institutionalisation is a very old plot device and I’ve been encountering it a lot lately; it came up in The Summoning, a book abby jean and I reviewed recently, and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith featured a storyline very similar to that of Wildthorne (here’s my review of Fingersmith if you’re interested, be aware it has spoilers).

In Wildthorn, the main character is introduced to us in an institutional setting. People are calling her by the wrong name and she insists that she doesn’t belong and there has been some frightful  mistake. As she attempts to figure out what has happened, she is moved progressively from the ward for ‘good’ patients to solitary and then to an open ward for the ‘worst’ cases, giving readers a glimpse of conditions in 19th century mental health facilities. She is subjected to brutality in the name of treatment, and is repeatedly ignored and silenced by the medical professionals around her.

As the story winds out, we learn that she was placed in the institution due to a complicated series of family machinations; the short version would be that her aunt sold her out, signing the paperwork to commit her on the orders of her daughter’s fiance, who didn’t want an independent young woman ‘bringing shame on the family.’ Along the way, we also learn that Louisa is lesbian; as she untangles the web of events that led her here, she also finds love, of a form very much forbidden in her era.

The book is an ok read (really, if you’re going to pick one book with this basic storyline, I’d recommend Fingersmith for its deliciously lyrical language), but it sparked some thoughts in me about institutionalisation stories and how they’re used. I feel like a lot of authors feel comfortable putting characters in institutions in earlier historical eras, and I get a whiff of ‘sheesh, at least things aren’t like this any more!’ when, in fact, there’s ample documentation of abuse going on in institutions right now as well as a movement pushing for deinstitutionalisation. It’s also notable to me that in most of these storylines, the institutionalised character is designed to be sympathetic and is humanised by nature of not being mentally ill. Anna pointed out this trend in pop culture last week, talking about television, and it shows up in books too. I’m sure there are books out there featuring actually mentally ill characters in institutions, but the thrust of the story in books like this isn’t that institutionalisation itself is necessarily wrong, but that it’s wrong because someone who didn’t ‘belong’ has been swept up.

Readers of books in this genre who aren’t very familiar with the history of institutionalisation and disability rights would probably come away with the takeaway that institutions used to be really bad, so it’s good that they’ve been reformed; both so that bad things don’t happen to inmates, and so that people can’t be locked up when they aren’t mentally ill. I’d really like to read a book featuring instutitonalisation in a modern setting with an actually mentally ill character (that isn’t a memoir, like Girl, Interrupted) to see how people deal with the theme when they can’t hide behind ‘well, the character doesn’t belong because she doesn’t have a mental illness!’ It would be interesting to see institutionalisation challenged directly by an author willing to ask why people are imprisoned in mental health facilities, period, rather than having it just used as a plot device, a spectre of terror, every ‘normal’ person’s worst nightmare.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

I wanted to love this book, I really did. I have enjoyed the couple of Julie Ellis novels I’ve read, but this one just tipped the charming/not happening scale a bit far. It has a really strong heroine in Vicky, who escapes the Russian pogroms to build a new life in America, trying to negotiate a difficult family situation and life as a prominent businesswoman. But there are lots of issues in this book that really grated, for example, every time a black servant is given an order, Ellis always points out how they were delighted to do it.

I’d just like to focus on the disability issues for now, though. There are many, not least with the disability-as-punishment trope cropping up at the end when the antagonist of the piece, Vicky’s son, has a stroke and is paralysed. He’s then housed in the cottage in which his mentally ill father shot himself. The very same cottage in which he kept Vicky while pretending she had a mental illness because he didn’t like the direction in which his mother was taking the company. Yep, it’s a bit of an intense novel.

But what I really want to talk about is the characterisation of Anita Roberts. Anita is married to Mark, a man Vicky falls in love with. So, naturally, she has to be a deceptive, evil shrew because that is the way “the other woman” gets sympathy in romance fiction. Except, she’s a wheelchair user, so it gets a lot more… interesting.

At first, Anita is set up as a martyr, the victim of a tragic accident who is doted on by her charming husband. They are a ‘special couple,’ Vicky is given to understand, and Anita is the darling of their social circle. As it turns out, she’s shrewd and conniving. She uses the excuse of the accident to deny her husband sex, even though the doctors said that they could have an ‘almost normal sex life’! It turns out that Anita never really wanted sex before the accident either, and now her horrible cruelty of not wanting sex has been unleashed! How terrible! It couldn’t possibly be the case that Anita doesn’t owe Marc sex, and she has become confident enough in herself to not engage with a sexual life she doesn’t really want. No, indeed. It is all about Marc’s pain and setting up his affair with Vicky. Anita’s not wanting sex gets to be the strange part, gets to be part of her evil scheme against poor Marc.

So, we’ve got the good crip who turns out to be hiding a deeply bitter and nasty nature. That’s old hat. But it was quite something to see that set up with a gendered aspect, too. Anita’s out to disparage Marc’s achievements and interests constantly, and she forces him to do ‘whatever she asks’ because otherwise he’s a terrible husband to his tragically beautiful and “damaged” wife. I suggest we identify a new trope, the Bad Shrewish Crip. The perfect mix of misogyny and ableism, out now at a bookstore near you.

But I really start to grit my teeth when we bring Anita’s Jewishness into it, because she perfectly fits the JAP stereotype. The Jewish American Princess is held to be a nagging, high maintenance woman with expensive taste and no sense of how irritating she is. And Anita is a JAP all over: she pokes fun at Vicky for having been a maid, loves designer clothing, and ends up forcing her husband to move to London as it is the only ‘civilised’ city on Earth. She’s simply set up as the most horrible conglomeration of disability, gender and racial/ethnic/cultural/religion stereotyping I have encountered in quite some time. The Bad Shrewish Jewish Crip, maybe?

So, in short: wanted to like it, feel kind of bad saying this because I like the author, but for goodness’ sake, this was one of the more frustrating reads of my year, and that is really saying something.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

My name is Chloe Saunders and my life will never be the same again.

All I wanted was to make friends, meet boys, and keep on being ordinary. I don’t even know what that means anymore. It all started on the day that I saw my first ghost—and the ghost saw me.

Now there are ghosts everywhere and they won’t leave me alone. To top it all off, I somehow got myself locked up in Lyle House, a “special home” for troubled teens. Yet the home isn’t what it seems. Don’t tell anyone, but I think there might be more to my housemates than meets the eye. The question is, whose side are they on? It’s up to me to figure out the dangerous secrets behind Lyle House . . . before its skeletons come back to haunt me.

s.e. smith: I loved the idea of superpowers being read as mental illness at first.

abby jean: well and i thought the twist of “these mortals pathologize difference” to “these people are are trying to control powers” was interesting.

abby jean: or pathologize supernatural difference.

s.e. smith: Yes! In a way it kind of reminded me of the myth that mental illness makes people naturally more creative. There’s that note of ‘scary and uncontrollable’ but also ‘we can use this.’

abby jean: “we just need to breed the good qualities and get rid of the bad ones.”

s.e. smith: Yes, and we just need to get it under control and then everything is fine. And we should put down the ones we can’t control.

abby jean: i thought the whole theme of “i know how i have to act to please the medical professionals” was quite well done

s.e. smith: Yes, and I also really liked the scene where she realises her aunt won’t believe her because of her diagnosis. Even though it later turns out the aunt has her own agenda going on, it felt very real.

abby jean: yeah, how aunt has a narrative going on know that she has no power to alter. and her own experiences and understandings are incorrect and deprioritized. for her own good.

s.e. smith: I think the book even used the term ‘lived experience’ at one point which blew me away.

abby jean: made me think of general discussions on on catholicism and exorcism, which are like “we have to protect these people from what they stupidly believe will help them.” because they cannot understand their own experiences. it was like “if these people are so backwards as to understand their mental illness that way, indulging it is doing them a medical disservice and anything that keeps them from psychiatric intervention is wrong.” which attitude i can see being applied to wrestling with was that a ghost or am i schizo, as mutually exclusive alternatives.

s.e. smith: It was also really interesting to see her coping with the diagnosis, when she thought that’s what it was. Going from freakout and calling herself ‘schizo’ to going ‘ok, this is part of me, I’m the same person, this is not my fault.’…And, you know, the way they treated the episode in the attic as a huge setback/failure, which in a treatment setting would encourage you to suppress your experiences.

abby jean: and how failure was so directly connected to loss of personal control, being kept there longer. freedom = reward for conforming. but then with tori showing how even that doesn’t work. even super conformity is still a failure and embarassment to the fam.

s.e. smith: And stepping up oversight, like with the urine samples. And there was also the whole thing with ‘we respect privacy and don’t talk about diagnoses’ paired with that social control that would have been impossible to miss. And of course you wouldn’t want patients talking to each other about their treatment. Because that might suggest they have agency.

abby jean: and finding common threads of being controlled is seen as a relapse.

s.e. smith: And building close relationships with other patients is deemed unhealthy

abby jean: well clearly their sexuality is totally out of control.

s.e. smith: Oh yes, obviously. *eyeroll*

s.e. smith: I also noted the use of outings to reward/control. Like, not even being able to go outside (even into a fenced and controlled area) without permission.

abby jean: and the nurses as security, medical oversight, and substitute family/domestic workers

s.e. smith: With total control over every aspect of their lives. It was also interesting to see the contradictory messages, like they aren’t allowed to stay in their rooms because it’s antisocial, but they also aren’t allowed to really interact with each other because that’s ‘not healthy.’ So you’re supposed to magically guess the ‘right’ amount of interaction to be rewarded, but no one will tell you what it is.

abby jean: and use your reason and logic to accept medical science and reject the idea of seeing ghosts, but do not use your brain to question anything else. what’s the right amount of reason?

s.e. smith: And, of course, stay busy with chores so you do not have time to think. Putting chores in the ‘free time’ part of the day.

abby jean: and only when you find the exact right amount, with no guidance or instruction and constantly moving goalposts designed to confuse and punish, can you be free to make any decisions for yourself.

s.e. smith: And of course you can’t ask other patients for guidance or mentoring because you aren’t allowed to talk about your diagnosis and will be fed a line of BS about how everyone’s progress is different, etc etc. Nor can you outright ask, because the staff will tell you there’s no formula.

abby jean: and that makes it look like you’re trying to game the system, rather than patiently waiting for the inevitably perfect outcomes that will result from just working their system. if you have to ask, you’re failing.

s.e. smith: Right, you’re supposed to organically understand it. Which is another example of how the lived experience is denied! Because people can say ‘I’m making progress’ and it’s ignored. It’s either assumed they are lying to work the system or they don’t actually know their own minds and bodies.

abby jean: and even compliance with the system can be denied. i really like having tori in there as someone who is trying really hard to work with the doctors and rejects the scheming and questioning and still gets fucked.

s.e. smith: Yeah she gets called the ‘pill princess’ and she’s basically ignored by the staff. That scene with her mother was really heartbreaking. Where her mother is screaming at her as though she, you know, enjoys whatever is happening to her.

abby jean: and the main doctor blowing her off.

s.e. smith: With all of the characters, it’s very much treated as something they should be able to control.

abby jean: even while they are systemically and purposefully being denied any control or agency.

s.e. smith: That was one scene that made me a little uneasy, when she was saying that Derek should be able to control himself and should have been able to prevent himself from hurting her, and he was agreeing with her. There’s a kind of hard line there, where, no, I don’t think it is acceptable to hurt people. But I also think that people do genuinely experience disassociations where they don’t know their own strength and can’t control themselves.

abby jean: i agree that some of their interactions felt a bit off to me.

s.e. smith: Like that scene in the opener where she’s kicking the teachers and the medics. She was basically lashing out the same way Derek did and we clearly weren’t meant to read her as accountable for her actions there. So it’s like where do you draw the line between something truly uncontrolled, and giving people a free pass on physical assault?

abby jean: true. i did think it was trying to say that the person who was assaulted should have some say/control over the punishment, that their experience should matter. so i guess we’d want to hear from the teacher/medic also, which we don’t.

s.e. smith: Yes, I definitely got that impression. And, to be fair, Derek also agreed that he should have been able to control his behaviour. So I don’t want to make the mistake of denying his knowledge of himself when critiquing that scene!

abby jean: he did. and his primary sense of guilt fwas from using it inappropriately. even though he didn’t really have knowledge/control when he was fighting in the playground.

s.e. smith: I think it’s possible to have a sense of guilt over something like that, while still knowing you couldn’t control yourself.

abby jean: i like that their superpowers were directly connected to emotional disturbance, so debating his werewolf strength usage seems more reasonable than thinking about what edward does as a vampire or whatever.

s.e. smith: Yes, yes it does! Speaking of supernaturally beautiful heroes, it was also interesting to me that the closer she got to Derek as a character, the less the book emphasized the fact that he’s supposed to be hideous.

abby jean: and the fact that some of his hideousness was connected to his powers, and as she accepted natural/supernatural differences she was more accepting of other differences. i feel like it took me half the book before i realized simon was supposed to be asian. was that a thing?

s.e. smith: It appeared to be! I enjoyed the way the book integrated people of colour without going ‘look at me! I’m inclusive!’ because it made me confront the way people usually read characters, which is usually white until proved otherwise. I also liked that we didn’t get a sense of supernatural superiority. The characters who knew what they were didn’t think they were better than humans.

abby jean: yes, and there didn’t seem to be any fight/hunt humans elements.

s.e. smith: Yes, and even though it was clear that a class of humans was a threat, they weren’t mapping that over to all humans.

abby jean: and chloe for a while was thinking about talking about things with her previous friends

s.e. smith: Yes, that storyline kind of petered out instead of being addressed. Once she started panicking about what would be in the ‘from’ line on her email.

abby jean: oh, yes. i forgot about that part.

s.e. smith: Which was kind of an interesting example of how people with mental illness get separated by stigma. She was allowed to contact people but she was afraid because she didn’t want them to know, so she was effectively cut off from the outside world.

abby jean: i was just typing basically that. and how it prevented the friends from even having a chance to react positively, so stigma hurts everyone even if you don’t have it!!

s.e. smith: And of course the whole storyline with them being cut off from Liz because she can’t be contacted for ‘safety.’ So basically, the only connections you can have are with fellow patients, but those get cut off as soon as they are transferred or ‘transferred’ in this case.

abby jean: and the idea that you don’t even know what potential options there are for you until they tell you what’s going to happen to you. who knew they could do that?

s.e. smith: Right, it’s like peeling back the layers of an onion. ‘You’ll be here for two weeks’ they say. And each day you learn that’s not only not true, but there’s a whole myriad of consequences for not following the rules. The rules that you don’t know because no one will tell you!

abby jean: but you are ostensibly there for stability and protection! to be free from worry!

s.e. smith: Everything is for your own good! Just relax and don’t think.

In summation: The Summoning is a book you might be interested in reading if you like young adult literature and you enjoy books where mental illness and denial of agency are explored!

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

[The scene sets with OYD, a slightly pale yet never-the-less still quite indigenous woman, sitting down to her trusty Macbook Pro, a laptop named "Lappy", who has seen better days. She sets down and opens up her "drafts" tab under FWD/Forward, where she notices that egads! she has been working on this book review for over a month, and Oh my! how it must have been a long time since she has completed one. She cracks her "double jointed" knuckles like she does it too often, tucks a strand of brown hair behind her ear. She drags the review out of "drafts", dusts it off, reaches for anything caffeinated, and begins to type.]

I like media where I can consume it, enjoy it, and get a sense that I am experiencing something that touches on experiences that are my own, that seems real to me with out over-exaggerating them (mostly). I also enjoy it when certain traits about characters are touched upon as a description, as part of who that character is, but then they are not brought up as Huge Deals throughout the entirety of the book.

These are a few things that really endeared Alexie Sherman’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to me. Sherman created a protagonist “Junior”, who was born into the world with several oppressions, living on the axis of poverty, race, and disability. Within the first few pages of the book Junior gives a pretty good run down of how each of these things affects his life, and has always affected his life from the moment he was born. From never having quite enough to eat, to the way his “grease on the brain” has given him a stutter and seizures.

But that is where Alexie leaves the discussion about Junior’s disability. It is just a part of him, a description of his character. It isn’t some great obstacle he has to overcome. His disability isn’t some plot point, and it doesn’t help the other people around him become inspired about trying harder or appreciating their lives more. In fact, he goes into great detail early on, in those first few pages, to explain that the reservation kids often bully him. From an excerpt on NPR:

You wouldn’t think there is anything life threatening about speech impediments, but let me tell you, there is nothing more dangerous than being a kid with a stutter and a lisp.

A five-year-old is cute when he lisps and stutters. Heck, most of the big-time kid actors stuttered and lisped their way to stardom.

And, jeez, you’re still fairly cute when you’re a stuttering and lisping six-, seven-, and eight-year-old, but it’s all over when you turn nine and ten.

After that, your stutter and lisp turn you into a retard.

And if you’re fourteen years old, like me, and you’re still stuttering and lisping, then you become the biggest retard in the world.

Everybody on the rez calls me a retard about twice a day. They call me retard when they are pantsing me or stuffing my head in the toilet or just smacking me upside the head.

I’m not even writing down this story the way I actually talk, because I’d have to fill it with stutters and lisps, and then you’d be wondering why you’re reading a story written by such a retard.

Do you know what happens to retards on the rez?

We get beat up.

At least once a month.

Yep, I belong to the Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club.

Sure I want to go outside. Every kid wants to go outside. But it is safer to stay at home. So I mostly hang out alone in my bedroom and read books and draw cartoons.

Then, he moves leaves it there. We know he deals with these things as part of his life, but they do not define his life. Even the most horrible and hurtful parts of his life with disability are not defining his life.

Some other things that are not defined by Junior’s particular disability:

• His grades in school — He does well in school, and this point becomes part of the main plot, so I won’t give too much away for anyone who plans to read this book.
• His ability to participate in sports — Junior plays many sports, including contact sports. He is a good basketball player, playing on the school’s team.
• His ability to have romantic relationships — Despite his believing how shallow it is, Junior has a girlfriend, and as it turns out, she actually likes him! Imagine that!

The other aspect of this book that I enjoyed, though I don’t expect every reader to view the same way, is that the Indian Reservation depicted has a lot of truth to it from my own experiences of having grown up on and around my own as a girl. Twenty, and even ten years ago, our reservation life was not so far off from the one described here, with the exception of perhaps the climate being slightly different, and perhaps I was too young to understand and remember anything about crime rates. But there was poverty, and then there was crushing poverty where I am from. There was alcoholism, though I would venture that perhaps it wasn’t the hot-button stereotype that I feel is portrayed at times in Alexie’s book. I don’t know. Every Native community is different, for sure, with their own unique set of problems. While I feel that there is a lot of truth to what Sherman Alexie has created, I also feel that there is a sweeping generalization. So, it hits and it misses, and I would encourage you to read it for yourself and decide what you think.

There are a lot of instances of language that I would not recommend in a progressive or social change setting going on here in this book. I see it being useful and very much achieving its purpose, for example, there is a very racist joke told by a white boy that Junior meets on his first day of school, using the “n”, which I will not repeat, but which is disparaging to Natives and Black people alike. Junior demonstrates an intolerance for it, without missing a beat, and in Junior’s point of view, the kid respects him for it. But, I have to wonder, is it because of how Junior addresses it, or because this particular student realizes that what he said was hurtful and wrong? The demonstration of how wrong racism is in YA literature is something I want to see more, but I question, sometimes, the ways in which we see it handled. There is almost no discussion or consideration of why this is wrong, just the very visceral use of very hateful words (like above, with the use of the “r” word in so casual a context). Just like using rape as a metaphor to show that a “bad” guy is bad, I don’t need to see or read -ist language for shock value to confront -isms. However, a well placed word could have the proper effect if viewed through the proper lens, but I don’t know if that is quite so obvious here. Junior simply reacts, saying he has to defend Black people, and Indians, but he doesn’t go into much else.

I will also note on the Wise White Person, or WWP, as I will. It takes a WWP living on the rez to point out all of Junior’s problems early on, and essentially Save Him! from the Rotten Destitution! Without a WWP, why poor Junior might be dead, the victim of a trailer fire started by grease from frybread, helplessly drunk and passed out.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is an excellent book, worth reading, for many reasons, but I caution you, gentle readers, there are many themes addressed, in very direct and raw ways that I am still not sure that I wholly approve of, and yet, as a non-white, Native American, woman, with a disability, I am not fully sure that fully disapprove of all of them either.

Oh, except for the sexist language. I found no use for that at all. I found no point where that taught any lesson, except where young boys were using it to show that “Hey!  Women and girls’ bodies are weak, so calling you a woman or a girl body part means you are weak! Har har!” You get no points there, Alexie. Misogyny wins again! Whee!

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

One of those books, which has had a great impact on me and which I have enjoyed in immensely different ways at hugely different periods of my life, partly because of the way the author’s experiences are painted into the word work and partly because of the story itself, is Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die. Veronkia was recommended to me by a friend who has in the past recommended other books that I have always enjoyed for one reason or another (including The Hitchhiker’s Guide and I, Lucifer, and who also gifted us with a set of 4.0 books for our wedding — you will either fully appreciate that or you won’t), and for me and the way I chew novels for breakfast was a quick read. It took me the better part of a morning. That friend knew that I sometimes practice what is commonly referred to as astral travel, and what I sometimes more commonly lump in with lucid dreaming (they feel the same to me) and thought that I might find the scenes about this topic interesting. I did. In an odd and slightly disturbing way.

In fact, that is how I would describe my first foray into Veronika. Odd and slightly disturbing.

So: Spoilers Ahoy and also a Trigger Warning for descriptions of attempted suicide, a potentially upsetting rape-like scene, and descriptions of mistreatment in a mental hospital.

Veronika Decides to Die (Veronika decide morrer in the original Porteguese) is set in Ljubljana, Slovenia, tells the story of Veronika (I suppose you could have parsed that one out), a 24 year old young woman, who has decided that she has reached the height of her life. She had determined that from this point that life and beauty will probably get no better, and out of no real sadness or unhappiness she has made, in her opinion, the perfectly rational decision to end her life. Her incompleted attempt on her own life winds her up in a mental institution called Villette, in Slovenia, where she awakens to the news that her attempt has irreparably damaged her heart; she is told she has only days to live.

The story is supposedly based on Coelho’s own experiences in mental institutions in his youth where his parents send him for refusing to acquiesce to their demands that he become an Engineer instead of a writer, or at least something useful and respectable. Coelho’s refusal to become something productive proved, to them, that he was “mad”. One of the central themes in Veronika is the idea that collective madness is really sanity, and that sanity is really in the hands of the beholder. Essentially, if everyone in a room, or even a kingdom, believes one reality to be the truth, except for a single person, irrespective of that one person’s authority (the doctor, a king, etc.), then the sanity of that authority is irrelevant, because it is the collective reality of the masses that matters and thus becomes the rational way of thinking.

The way you view this theme really depends on your views of people’s right to define their own mental abilities. I viewed this book through two very different lenses in my life, one where I was fighting my own mind, and one where I was coming to terms with myself instead; a period of self-acceptance rather than self-loathing (still working on that last part). Veronika depicts a mental institution that both suppresses people’s free will, yet allows them to stay beyond the requirement that binds them if they choose to do so. Don’t be fooled, however: There are still many things going on, such as forced medication, forced inside and outside time, and even a scene that describes, very graphically, a treatment of induced insulin shock that sends a patient into what she calls a state of astral travel. The balance of treatment of human dignity with that of the way that disabled people are often treated as objects to be shuffled around and poked and strapped down is troublesome at best, and hard to read without a watery field in front of you at… well my worst. Maybe not yours.

Very troubling to me is the overarching theme, embodied in Dr. Igor, the head psychiatrist at Villette, who has decided that Veronika, a beautiful and vibrant young girl, is wasting her life, and must be taught a Very Special Lesson. So sad, is it, that she has decided to throw away youth, and beauty, and that she is ignoring all that life must be waiting to hand her. He, obviously, knows her life better than she, and is uniquely prepared to teach her that she is, indeed, Doing It Wrong. R-O-N-G, even. How good of Dr. Igor, this man, to come and rescue this poor, helpless, and foolish girl from what might have been the worst mistake ever.

Dr. Igor has this theory, see, that people, like a defibirillator paddle on a heart, just need a jump start to avoid the heart attack that is this mental illness, something he calls “vitriol”. He believes he can shock people into appreciating life and just help them realize that they can simply buck up and learn to love life again.

I don’t want to spoil the book for you, gentle readers, if at this point you are still with me, so I won’t go into detail about how Veronika becomes not only the tool by which he provoke many of the residents of Villette, including Eduard, a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia who becomes a love interest for Veronica, and Mari who has frequent panic attacks. I also won’t tell you how Veronika learns her own Very Special Lesson, because she is not left out of that condescending rule of Dr. Igor who swings his diploma like a true Patriarch. She suddenly sees that she is free from the rules of a society that has given her a laundry list of expectations, and that she now may act like the “crazy” person that she is being treated like. No one believes that she just felt like ending her life, for no particular reason, so she may as well act the part. She starts to see the comfort that is Villette’s lack of accountability.

I think this book speaks strongly to the way that we dehumanize and mistrust mental health patients and people living with any variety of mental illness. Even if I don’t always appreciate Coelho’s delivery.

A caution to you, gentle readers: There is a rape-like scene, depending on how you read it (the first time I read the book, I did not read it this way, the second, I certainly did). Veronika performs a masturbatory act in front of a person who neither consents nor denies consent. It is fairly graphic in description, and it very much made me uncomfortable, no matter how “freeing” it made Veronika feel.

The book was made into a movie that I have not yet seen, as it didn’t appear at any theatre anywhere near where I was living. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as Veronika (a stellar choice, IMO), and David Thewlis, most well known to me as Professor Lupin from the Harry Potter series, as Dr. Igor. Should I get the chance (I love you, NetFlix, for coming to my APO!), I may revisit the review.

Who out there, gentle readers, fellow contributors, has read Veronika? Thoughts? Popcorn? Tomatoes?

Book Cover Image: Wikimedia Commons

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

*ahem*

*stops derailing her own post*

For those of you who haven’t read The Sisterhood of the the Traveling Pants series, I can give you my brief brush up, and if you have, feel free to skip ahead to the rest of this post.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a wonderful series about four young women: Bridget (Bee), Carmen, Lena, and Tibby, born withing seventeen days of each other. They are more than just friends, having grown up together due to their mothers being best friends, and having grown so close that they forget where one ends and the other begins. It is not uncommon to find Tibby tapping her foot on Lena’s leg or Bridget leaning her chin on Carmen’s shoulder while playing with her hair. They can tell when each other are hurting or hiding something or bubbling over with joy or exciting news. They have grown up sharing in each others’ joys, triumphs, losses, and sorrows. They have experienced growing pains and growing up as a unit and have leaned on each other for support through things like Carmen’s parent’s divorce, Tibby’s parent’s decision to have more children when she was much older, and Bridget’s mother’s suicide. Even as the other three mothers drifted apart, they seemed to hold tighter to each other

We enter these young women’s lives as they are about to embark on their first summer apart, when by chance Carmen came to own the eponymous Pants, happening upon them in a thrift store while shopping with Lena and hers sister and mother one day. The Pants unleashed their magic, when each girl, each being different, was able to put them on. They then decided that the Pants would travel with them, being sent to each young woman with notes lovingly written updating each other on their adventures until they were together again.

The Pants, somehow, made them bolder, stronger, and in a way taught them to be themselves while showing them that they were never apart. The Pants helped them draw strength from each other as they had to stand on their own so far away from their support systems. They saw the things about themselves that they had to refine and define. They had to be apart to learn how to be themselves together, yet, in a heartbreaking moment, they find that they can pull together to be there for just one.

All Together Now!

The inaugural book’s cardinal theme seemed to be that young women had stories that mattered to other young women, and that their lives were important, even if some of the stories were told from the wrong point of view. In keeping with that theme, the second book showed us that a young woman can fight her deamons on her own terms, and that the generations of women in her life affect her while the friends she makes support her.

The third book, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood has much to say about young women and the other women in their lives.

*Mild Spoilers Ahoy!*

Carmen has trouble moving on. She is afraid that if she leaves home that someone is going to replace her in her mother’s new life with her new husband. Carmen is almost willing to give up a great opportunity (a privileged one, paid for by her apparently more affluent father) to stay home and stake her territory.

Carmen also is the person who recognizes a horrible wrong taking place when she agrees to become the caregiver for Lena’s grandmother, Valia. In the second book, Lena’s grandfather died, and now Valia has been forced by Lena’s father to come to the U.S. from her lifelong home in Greece to live. It is Carmen who sees how much pain Valia is in, leaving her home where she has friends and a support system. It is Carmen who notices that Lena’s family tries to avoid looking a Valia, because she is making everyone miserable by being cranky. It is Carmen who realizes that there is a person there, hurting from the incredible loss, and points her out to Lena. Not Lena, who is credited by her family. What happens to Valia in this book hurts me, and makes it painful to read.

Tibby has a boyfriend, and is afraid of losing herself in the process. Tibby is the quiet one, afraid of change, and prone to panic. She doesn’t know how to move ahead and express her feelings. Having watched her Guinea pig die, then her friend, she shuts down when her younger sister tries to jump out of a bedroom window and crack her skull. Tibby is trying to grasp how to confront the changes in her life, and doesn’t want to lose anything else. Then she is thrown into a situation where she is needed to help confront a huge change, and it just might help her face those ghosts in the process.

Bee, having climbed back on top of her life again, is aptly described by Tibby on page 4 of the book as an ocean blue Ferrari minus breaks, with no air bags, and possibly no bumpers. In Tibby’s description of Bee, she would go a million miles an hour and would have no breaks. Bridget has been working on holding herself back from the fast forward life that has kept her one step ahead of her grief, and last summer she faced it head on. Now, back at soccer camp, this time as a coach, she is facing Eric, the guy who was the precipitating factor in her spiral of depression, or, at least, that is how it was framed in the book. If you will note from my previous post on this:

Bridget was very young and emotionally traumatized in the first book by the death of her mother. I read her as aggressively and almost destructively seeking the attention of Eric, the coach at her camp, and it was all very messy and complicated and I didn’t read any blame to be placed on any one person. That being said, Eric, as the older person, had the responsibility to stop the relationship if it was unwanted instead of allowing it to continue, being that Bridget was fifteen at the time of the encounter and he was eighteen. Some aspects of the relationship between Bridget and Eric make me uncomfortable, and some read to me as simply something I advocate for: Teenagers being allowed to discover sex on their own terms. Age of consent laws are awkward for teenagers, where the magic number between legal and illegal are literally overnight. I also wonder about the fallout of writing a character like Bridget seeking and having a sexual encounter and having such severe depression.

I don’t fault an author for writing a sexual relationship between teenagers, but I wonder about showing one this explicit resulting in a downward spiral into deep depression.

Now, Bridget has to learn how to hold back, and how to keep herself and her emotions in check, and she seems to learn that it can be a great asset to herself.

The biggest point in this book is the storyline with the character that I probably like the least, and that is Lena.

Lena is the most privileged of the four (although, Tibby runs a close second). In-tact “traditional” family, two-income, upper class household. She is described as more than conventionally attractive, and her parents are more than doting. She has an exceptional talent for art, and at one of her art classes her father walks in on her drawing a nude man. He throws a tantrum over this, and decides that he will not pay for that class or for her to go to art school. Lena is ready to give up on art school, until her art teacher, Annik, who is a wheelchair user, tells her that she can apply for a scholarship (after Lena does much sulking and whining). Annik tells her that she’s got to learn to fight for herself, because it is Very Special Lesson time.

Annik offers to sit for a drawing, and Lena draws her, from the shoulders up, but leaves out her chair. Annik tells her how her chair is a “complicated” part of her, but still, it is a part of her, and that Lena should have included it in the drawing. She tells her that she has talent, that her scholarship portfolio should be drawings, but that she’s “gotta draw the chair”, apparently meaning that Lena has to find the special thing about everyone she draws. This of course, is fleshed out in long expositions about how Lena draws the members of her family who are all hurting, because of the ways they have hurt Valia, who is pretty much invisible.

Supercrip Art Teacher has saved the day, teaching Lena how to see her family better, resolving all the painful problems. Of course, this means that Lena’s father thanks her for helping him to see that he treated Valia wrong, when it was Carmen who told them she was hurting (there was some rub on me that Carmen is Latina, taking care of Valia in the first place, and that kind of pushed it over for me, but wev).

I still like the series, I very much like the series, but there have been small slights in each so far that have given me pause. Of course, I have yet to read a YA book that has been perfect, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants has been more about young women and their lives than any other I have read recently (I should dig up my old Babysitter’s Club books!). That doesn’t excuse the other -isms I find in them, but I prefer to be aware of them as I read rather than ignorant.

Still, young women’s stories in YA are important. I will keep looking for them. And probably nannering on at you about them!

Until next time!

Cover Image from East Meadow Public Library

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

I however, didn’t heed Anna’s warning, when she asked me whywhyWHY would someone who loves me recommend a book series to me where a chicken is written in as EVIL personified (this is actually a simplification of the storyline, but it is true, nonetheless…), and as it turns out I think Anna may love me more. Who knows. Maybe I was hooked by the way the first two books ended with just the most convenient and precious heterocentric endings ever (there is one brief nod in the fourth book to homosexuality that seems it could be positive, but then it ends sadly, and seven books later there is no happy ending for this character).

The Sword of Truth series, however, does have many good qualities. It has several well written female characters whom I fell in love with, but, as I will write more about at my home blog, all seem to be written to be smitten with and to be in the service of the central protagonist, Richard Cypher/Rahl. They simply fall all over themselves to serve him, to love him, and to swear their lives to protect him with everything they have. Even if they were once evil or if they have tendencies to be evil (it’s just their way, you see, some women can’t help it), they somehow over come it because his presence is enough to ignite a spark to make them want to fight for their own lives him. I mean his cause.

But the Sword of Truth series isn’t just an innocent fantasy series. It isn’t even a series filled with tropes about women characters that I love that happens to beat me upside the head with forbidden romance and a love forbidden to procreate. It is a cautionary tale that warns of the evils of allowing communism to take over your life. This strange story of caring for your fellow man is bent into a monolithic monster of a machination that kills everything it touches. It simply asserts that you must live in misery for that is the only way that everyone can possibly meet the needs of every human evil, and makes the horrible and incorrect logical leap that religion is somehow tied to it, that this life is meaningless and that goodness can only be obtained in the hereafter. I can’t say I disagree with the atheistic themes, but really, a horse can only be beaten so many times before I glaze over and gloss over entire pages of exposition and soliloquy.

To be righteous in this world that Mr. Goodkind has created you must be willing and — key word alert here — able to fight for your own life and protect it with everything you have, up to and including killing those who would take it from you. With sword, with your bare hands, with magic if you are … gifted.

Yes, “gifted”. Being born with the ability to use and be touched by magic is considered a gift, which is not an uncommon theme in fantasy fiction and pop culture, but Goodkind takes it a step further, it seems to me. It is almost as though magic is another sense, an ability above and beyond that makes up for any other sense you may lack. Because if there is one thing that is all but lacking from this world that Mr. Goodkind has created, it is disability on the side of the bringers of good.

Even Adie, the “bone woman” (who oddly enough, having the speech pattern “I be” in the books*, is depicted as a non-white woman in the television series equivalent Legend of the Seeker even though that is now how she is described, but she is All Exotic! with Bones!), who had her vision stripped from her in her youth by a group of anti-magic zealots known as The Blood of the Fold by pouring bleach in her eyes, has learned to see. Her “gift” has enabled her to see. In fact, her vision, as is noted many times in the books, is often better than those who must rely on their ‘non-gifted’ vision.

I am going to drop the quotes from here on out, because it is getting tedious, and I think you get the point.

Adie never had to learn how to access the world around her. She never had to learn how to stumble around and feel with her other senses. She did, however, have to learn how to see with her magic, which made up for the vision which wasn’t there. This gave her the ability to be worthy, in the world that Goodkind created, to be able to fight for her life, and be allowed to live. People should just try harder, as Adie did. If you can’t get by in life, it is your own fault, and you are not contributing properly to the artwork that is the nobility of man!

You can understand why I was having a problem here.

Normally with pop-culture and fiction, there aren’t really absolutes, and I admit that there are multiple ways of interpreting things, but Goodkind has done a unique thing here: he has created a world of moral absolutes. This is right and this other things is wrong. What Richard Rahl (the protagonist) believes is right, and what he is against is wrong. There is clear good and evil, and the lines are rarely blurred. This use of a gift of magic allows people who otherwise have flaws to remain on the correct side of Richards moral compass. Richard, and Goodkind himself, could be described as Objectivists, which I think would clear up my frustrations. It should have set off alarms as soon as the philosophy lessons started to seep into my fantasy novel. Except OOPS! Mr. Goodkind says he is not a fantasy writer, merely a fiction writer he says (fuck you, fans!), so I have been wrong all along…

But Adie couldn’t be useful to the story, she couldn’t be the powerful and badass sorceress that she is depicted as being if she was indeed blind, amirite? Because if she was wasting all of her time trying to adapt to a world that was refusing to make accommodations for her she wouldn’t be able to fight for her individual life, or for Richard’s noble cause of laissez faire Capitalism freedom for all mankind (and I guess some of those womenfolk too).

The only time that her magical eyesight didn’t work was when she was faced with a woman, Jennsen, who was born without even a spark of the gift, called a “pristinely ungifted” person. She can not be touched by or interact with magic. Turns out, that Jennsen is Richard’s half sister, and her being ungifted is the bi-product of Richard’s gift. There can be only one! She has to be ungifted so that he can be gifted. It is very complicated, and there is an entire race of people on whom Adie’s magical eyesight doesn’t work! And Jennsen had to help Richard rally them up, because they were blind (oh the tropes and ableist language abound!) to evil, and their pacifist asses wouldn’t raise a finger to fight for their artwork of individual self interest.

I was just frustrated beyond all belief.

So if you want a nice stew of -ism and fuckery passed off as philosophy and disguised with characters that you will certainly love, I recommend Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. All eleven (soon to be twelve!) books of it!

EDIT: 01 Sept: I forgot a couple of links when I finished this post. Apologies!

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

Although the book is basically chronological, Burch divides the subject into overall themes and discusses them at length. She starts with the Oralism vs Sign Language in Schools issue, then discusses the growing Deaf community, Deaf-focused Associations and Clubs (including Deaf athletes competing in mainstream sports), barriers to Deaf people and working, and legal issues that Deaf people faced, including proposed bans on Deaf-Deaf marriages (think of the children!) and bans on Deaf people driving.

Throughout, Burch discusses intersectionality. While the chapters are primarily focused (due to sources) on white Gallaudet-educated men, she devotes time in every chapter to discussing how white women in the same situations were treated, and how Black Deaf people had almost entirely different experiences from white Deaf people, such as the segregated school system and racism within the Deaf community. I’m pretty certain this is Burch’s earliest work, and I know her later stuff focuses a lot more on these issues.

One thing I really liked about this book as well is that Burch puts a short sketch of the life of various Deaf people in every chapter. This gives us someone to “root” for, as well as someone to celebrate or make note of. It’s easy to look at a book like this, that talks about broad cultures, and forget that individuals were actually involved in it. I also like that, for the most part, these were people I hadn’t heard of. While Gallaudet and Clerc are discussed – they have to be, really, for any history of Deaf education in the US – the life sketches are of people like Alice Taylor Terry or Thomas Francis Fox.

I found the text very engaging, and not difficult to read. Like most people, I’ve groaned my way through dull prose that made me want to sleep rather than read, but Burch’s writing kept me wanting to stay up late reading.

I give this book 5/5 stars, and would totally recommend it to anyone. The only thing that makes me eager to put it aside is that I have some of Burch’s later books and edited anthologies in my To Be Read (TBR) pile.

[Signs of Resistance at WorldCat].

[Limited Preview of Signs of Resistance on GoogleBooks]

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

I had some difficulties with this book which may colour my review. Its primary audience is, of course, literary scholars and (presumably) people who read Victorian literature. I am, sadly, neither of these things, but even so I did manage to get a great deal out of the book.

Klages analyses a variety of textual sources, varying from Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop” to Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker”, from Cumming’s “The Lamp Lighter” to Annual Reports from the Perkins Institute for the Blind and various autobiographical works by blind women. I especially enjoyed the latter, as there are very few examples of writing of actual blind women from this time period, and Klages’ discussion of these (few) works made me want to seek them out to read for myself. It’s frustrating how rare such treasures are.

Klages makes two points which I think are most important. The first, evident throughout the whole book, is that representations of people with disabilities haven’t really changed all that much since Dickens. There are certainly shining lights, some of which we’ve talked about here on FWD, but mostly, people with disabilities in media and pop culture are still presented as tragedies, as poster children, or as lessons for the non-disabled. It grows rather tiring to read descriptions of books I’ve never read and realise that they’re basically describing books I have – because the tropes just haven’t changed that drastically.

The other thing that I think is important is in this paragraph:

To become a self… twentieth century disabled people have had to deny, forget, or erase the bodies that mark them as physically different. They have had to accede to forms of self-hood available through sentimental value systems, which construct them as both objects and agents of feeling and empathy, but not necessarily as capable of independent rational thought and economic autonomy. And they have had to renounce virtually all forms of physical sexuality, accepting the disabled body only as a site for feeling, rather than for production, reproduction, or pleasure. These factors, the result of more than one hundred and fifty years of sentimental representations of disability have over-determined the relegation of disabled people to the position of perpetual ‘poster children’, and prevented them from becoming recognized as adults, operating on the same terms, and with the same concerns and rights, as non-disabled adults. ¹

In essence, these representations are things we either attempt to fit ourselves into, or struggle to remove ourselves from, but they still impact us, no matter what choices we make.

For the most part, I enjoyed Klages work, although I think getting the full value of the read would require a bit more background than Klages puts in. That said, one could check this book out, review the chapter titles, and sort out which bits most interest you, as it reads more as a series of inter-connected articles than one ‘whole’ argument. The writing style felt very jargon-heavy to me, but I’m not a literary scholar and thus I’m not positive I was her target audience to begin with; I’m certain others would have no problems. I give it 3/5 stars.

Commenting note: I am, as I said, on Thesis Time right now, which basically means I’m hardly at all around. If you decide to comment, please keep commenting policies in mind, and I’ll do my best to keep up with them.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

A while back I read and reviewed Ann Brashares’ The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants here. I loved it, and proceeded to immediately read the sequel, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, but neglected to write anything about it. I have come to you, dearest readers, hoping for your forgiveness, and to make up for such forgetfulness. I have recently checked the third book out of the local base library and can’t possibly read it or the other books in my “To Review for FWD” stack (YES! I really have one of those!) until I rectify this situation.

If you aren’t familiar with the series and are disinclined to read my previous post, which is just fine by me (for reals) here is a quick recap (you may skip ahead here): The Traveling Pants series is about four young women, Bridget (Bee), Carmen, Tibby, and Lena, who are best friends, and who describe themselves as so close that they forget where each of themselves ends and the other begins. They grew up together having been born all within the same seventeen days, each coming from different ethnic and economic backgrounds with different household situations (although they are all fairly securely middle-class, with at least two of the families being arguably very upper-middle, and the series is squarely hetero-normative), starting with their mothers all being best friends themselves. Their mothers drifted apart after the suicide of Bee’s mother following her long depression. The girls, however, remain close right up until their first summer apart when we first meet them, and Carmen comes into possession of the eponymous Pants at a second-hand store. The Pants help them through their first summer apart, when they learn how to be together even when apart, and that the word “friends” is stronger than many people give it credit for. They learn how to be strong for each other through the life shattering events that are part of the growing, aching, and changing from childhood into young adulthood, especially as young women.

It is amazingly poignant, as it gives us stories of four young women told from four young women’s perspectives, and that is what drew me to it initially. I have many criticisms to make of the book, and I am willing to make them and discuss them openly in comments. This book is from a cis, straight, perspective. Much of it passes the Bechdel test, as in, huge chunks of it go by passing with flying colors because it is about the parts of girls’ lives that involve shit that matters to girls/young women and women as they relate to the other women in their lives, and a lot of that, funnily enough, just doesn’t always revolve around men.

(All Together Now!)

The Second Summer of the Sisterhood returns us to these same young women, getting ready to go, once again on their separate ways, except that wasn’t the plan all along. In the beginning only Tibby had plans of going away to a summer film camp, and the other three girls were going to stay behind, getting summer jobs. But suddenly, Bee, dragging along some demons from her past, and new ones from the summer before, made an impulsive plan to go to Alabama to see her Grandmother.

It is Bee’s story that strikes at me the most. Bee, who during the last book was impulsive and active and defiant, who couldn’t sit still and had to run. Bee, who suddenly came home, and quit soccer — an activity which had been a huge part of her life since she was very young — and became quiet. Bee, who died her golden hair as dark as she could get it, and withdrew from everyone but the three other girls in the book who tried to give her the space to figure out who she needed to be at this time. Even then, we see that the impulsive and super-active, full-throttle life was Bee’s way of coping with her mother’s suicide. Bee had always thrown herself forward into life in hopes that she will outrun the sadness of that death, or so it seems to me, and each of her friends sometimes describe themselves as standing back and holding their breaths as Bee makes up her mind to go after something she wants, ready to be there and catch her, or pieces of her, when she gets it. Even Bee sometimes describes herself as running away from something by the end of the first book.

But Bridget has decided that she is going to Alabama to meed the grandmother that her father never allowed her to know — her mother’s mother. This flip of narrative interested me, notably because it is usually the mothers we hear about, distancing and holding their children from knowing their fathers’ families. This interested me, because here is a young woman telling her father that she has a right to know these people, that she has an agency outside of what he decided for her. Her father disagreed with how her grandmother wanted to handle Bridget’s mother’s depression, and he blames her in part for her death, and Bridget wants to meet her and decide for herself.

But Bridget is fighting her own depression.

[Spoilers Ahoy!]

A sexual encounter at the end of the first book has left Bridget reeling. And without my getting into the dynamics of whether or not this could be considered statutory rape or consensual teenage sex, Bridget has realized that she has to find out more about Marly, her mother, and this grandmother she hasn’t seen since she her mother died, in order to face that depression, before she engages in anymore activity that she isn’t quite ready for*.

So she decides, since no one recognizes the young woman depression has made her right now anyway, she goes to Alabama to meet Greta, her grandmother, and puts on a remarkable ruse of pretending to be a young girl looking for summer work, lying to Greta, and doing daily chores for the old woman. Through the summer she rediscovers her love of soccer, loses some weight (because weight and depression and blah blah blah!) that allows her to be able to put the magical Pants on once again, energizing her with the love of her friends, and gives her the strength to tell Greta the truth, which gives her the tools to realize that she doesn’t have to spiral into depression like her mother did…which was her greatest fear. That she would be helpless to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

Bridget’s depression is written in a way that I find strikes me in the heart. Once again, I have to read parts of this book in a room away from others because I get all teary-eyed. The building relationship between Bridget and Greta is important, we get to see two women, separated by an entire generation, with a huge gap stolen by devastating depression, yet brought back together by the aftermath of that depression and a depression unique to each remaining woman. I love the way that Brashares takes the stories of four young women and weaves other women into them. And once in awhile she writes disability in a way that doesn’t break my heart. Or, it breaks my heart in a good way.

If you have read my previous post, and remember the story line about Tibby and Bailey, I have a quick note there.

Tibby goes to film camp, and makes a string of poor decisions in an effort to try to be clever and popular with the kids she thinks are important or cool. In the end, she winds up making a film about Bailey, which she gives to Bailey’s parents, but which also has the benefit of teaching her, again, a Very Special Lesson about people, continuing the idea that Bailey was always a plot device, and never a character all along. An event on the Pants, and not a person. Bailey becomes a personality trait about Tibby, and was never meant to become a person, so please feel free to discuss this as well.

Since I spent so much time discussing Bailey and Tibby in the last post I wanted to focus on Bridget in this post, although I feel that there will be more Bee to come.

*Bridget was very young and emotionally traumatized in the first book by the death of her mother. I read her as aggressively and almost destructively seeking the attention of Eric, the coach at her camp, and it was all very messy and complicated and I didn’t read any blame to be placed on any one person. That being said, Eric, as the older person, had the responsibility to stop the relationship if it was unwanted instead of allowing it to continue, being that Bridget was fifteen at the time of the encounter and he was eighteen. Some aspects of the relationship between Bridget and Eric make me uncomfortable, and some read to me as simply something I advocate for: Teenagers being allowed to discover sex on their own terms. Age of consent laws are awkward for teenagers, where the magic number between legal and illegal are literally overnight. I also wonder about the fallout of writing a character like Bridget seeking and having a sexual encounter and having such severe depression. It is just a thought.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.