![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jul. 19th, 2019 03:38 pmIt's been a long time since I last read of Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, so maybe this comparison wouldn't hold up if I reread it, but I spent a lot of Audrey Erskine Lindop's I Start Counting feeling like I was reading a sort of funhouse mirror version of Fire and Hemlock - variation on the theme of So You're A Clever And Imaginative Teen Girl And Then Things Got Weird, except instead of being a fantasy novel about fairies and family and obligation, I Start Counting is a thriller ... about a serial killer .......
OK yes I know, BUT, hear me out, both books are thematically concerned with:
- nostalgia and memory and weird haunted houses in postwar suburban Britain
- codependent, thorny friendships between girls on the cusp of adolescence
- the intense way teenage girls sometimes feel about adult men who were kind to them as children and how it makes EVERYONE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE
... and I, too, am uncomfortable! but I also find it kind of fascinating how Audrey Erskine Lindop comes back to this theme again and again, and always walks this very careful line; the teen girls are always like "I am a woman in love! my feelings are real and valid!" and the adults on whom they are crushing are always like "HARD YIKES," and then a secondary character will be like "well ok but, you know, they have boobs now, you might be into them?" and the adult will be like "I CARE FOR THEM DEEPLY AS THE CHILD THAT THEY ARE, LET US NOT INTERACT UNTIL THEY HAVE OUTGROWN THIS UNFORTUNATE IRRATIONAL PHASE" and then the girl is like "okay, but, consider: that will never happen," and then plot happens and the narrative resolutely refuses to collapse the emotional tension. I'm always afraid, in reading, that her books will go full Tom/Polly or Daine/Numair or Gigi or [insert five million other examples that romanticize this kind of relationship here], and they never do! Unlike many of the beloved authors of our youth, Audrey Erskine Lindop knows it's weird and uncomfortable! and in this book in particular she's just setting up camp in that weird and uncomfortable place.
Anyway the actual plot of I Start Counting is that fourteen-year-old protagonist Wynne has been noticing that her much-older adopted stepbrother George, who has always been her favorite person in ways that got weirder as she got older, is acting strange and avoidant. While visiting their old house -- which for her symbolizes the Time Before Adolescence Hit And Things Got Weird but for George symbolizes The Time His Fiancee Died In A Tragic Hit-And-Run -- she stumbles across some clues that might indicate that he is actually the serial killer who's been on the loose!
Wynne subsequently decides that the only possible course of action is to investigate the serial killings herself, while burying all possible evidence that might implicate George. This all goes ... not as terribly as it could, honestly ... but people do die ... so that's not great ...... anyway being a teen girl is really difficult, is the thing. You just have so many feelings!
( Spoilers for the curious )
OK yes I know, BUT, hear me out, both books are thematically concerned with:
- nostalgia and memory and weird haunted houses in postwar suburban Britain
- codependent, thorny friendships between girls on the cusp of adolescence
- the intense way teenage girls sometimes feel about adult men who were kind to them as children and how it makes EVERYONE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE
... and I, too, am uncomfortable! but I also find it kind of fascinating how Audrey Erskine Lindop comes back to this theme again and again, and always walks this very careful line; the teen girls are always like "I am a woman in love! my feelings are real and valid!" and the adults on whom they are crushing are always like "HARD YIKES," and then a secondary character will be like "well ok but, you know, they have boobs now, you might be into them?" and the adult will be like "I CARE FOR THEM DEEPLY AS THE CHILD THAT THEY ARE, LET US NOT INTERACT UNTIL THEY HAVE OUTGROWN THIS UNFORTUNATE IRRATIONAL PHASE" and then the girl is like "okay, but, consider: that will never happen," and then plot happens and the narrative resolutely refuses to collapse the emotional tension. I'm always afraid, in reading, that her books will go full Tom/Polly or Daine/Numair or Gigi or [insert five million other examples that romanticize this kind of relationship here], and they never do! Unlike many of the beloved authors of our youth, Audrey Erskine Lindop knows it's weird and uncomfortable! and in this book in particular she's just setting up camp in that weird and uncomfortable place.
Anyway the actual plot of I Start Counting is that fourteen-year-old protagonist Wynne has been noticing that her much-older adopted stepbrother George, who has always been her favorite person in ways that got weirder as she got older, is acting strange and avoidant. While visiting their old house -- which for her symbolizes the Time Before Adolescence Hit And Things Got Weird but for George symbolizes The Time His Fiancee Died In A Tragic Hit-And-Run -- she stumbles across some clues that might indicate that he is actually the serial killer who's been on the loose!
Wynne subsequently decides that the only possible course of action is to investigate the serial killings herself, while burying all possible evidence that might implicate George. This all goes ... not as terribly as it could, honestly ... but people do die ... so that's not great ...... anyway being a teen girl is really difficult, is the thing. You just have so many feelings!
( Spoilers for the curious )
