(no subject)
Mar. 28th, 2020 06:45 pmFor something wildly different that also happens to be a story set during WWII about unhappy young women and bad parenting, I also just recently finished Laura Ruby's Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All.
The ostensible protagonist of this book is Frankie, a teen girl being raised in an Chicago orphanage with her siblings because her single father can't invest more time in them than one afternoon a week, until, eventually, he moves out of state with his new wife and cannot invest any time in them at all.
The actual protagonist is Pearl, the ghost who serves as the book's narrator, who spends about half the book following Frankie around and telling us what's going on with her -- not because of any particular connection between them, just because she likes watching the orphanage girls and finds Frankie interesting -- and the other half following her own ghost pursuits, such as spying on other favorite humans, reading The Hobbit over the shoulder of that one guy in the library, and having potentially unreliable flashbacks to her own life and death.
About halfway through the book she encounters another ghost capable of communication, another angry young woman whose story forms a kind of thematic third leg ...
... or so I think. The book is trying to do a lot of things, a great big messy outpouring of feelings about sexism and racism and war and grief and forgiveness and revenge and history and America; it's extremely interesting and compelling and I'm not one hundred percent sure it succeeds in pulling itself completely together, but I'm also not sure it needs to? The things it's talking about are big and messy, too, and there aren't easy life lessons to be pulled out of them. It's a book I'm going to be thinking about a lot, anyway.
(That said, it's definitely at its strongest when it's straightforwardly telling compelling personal stories, rather than when Pearl is ghost-omnisciently stressing about all of the manifold terrible things happening all across the world in the 1940s, at least for me. I know about all the terrible things! I want to know the things that are happening or have happened to these specific people!)
The ostensible protagonist of this book is Frankie, a teen girl being raised in an Chicago orphanage with her siblings because her single father can't invest more time in them than one afternoon a week, until, eventually, he moves out of state with his new wife and cannot invest any time in them at all.
The actual protagonist is Pearl, the ghost who serves as the book's narrator, who spends about half the book following Frankie around and telling us what's going on with her -- not because of any particular connection between them, just because she likes watching the orphanage girls and finds Frankie interesting -- and the other half following her own ghost pursuits, such as spying on other favorite humans, reading The Hobbit over the shoulder of that one guy in the library, and having potentially unreliable flashbacks to her own life and death.
About halfway through the book she encounters another ghost capable of communication, another angry young woman whose story forms a kind of thematic third leg ...
... or so I think. The book is trying to do a lot of things, a great big messy outpouring of feelings about sexism and racism and war and grief and forgiveness and revenge and history and America; it's extremely interesting and compelling and I'm not one hundred percent sure it succeeds in pulling itself completely together, but I'm also not sure it needs to? The things it's talking about are big and messy, too, and there aren't easy life lessons to be pulled out of them. It's a book I'm going to be thinking about a lot, anyway.
(That said, it's definitely at its strongest when it's straightforwardly telling compelling personal stories, rather than when Pearl is ghost-omnisciently stressing about all of the manifold terrible things happening all across the world in the 1940s, at least for me. I know about all the terrible things! I want to know the things that are happening or have happened to these specific people!)