(no subject)
Jun. 2nd, 2019 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMy love of Briarley turned Aster Glenn Gray's works into an instant buy for me, so I was extremely pleased when her new novella Ashlin & Olivia turned up just in time to get me through my last plane flight of May!
In junior high, Ashlin moved to Olivia's school, where the two immediately struck up the kind of obsessive preteen friendship that sometimes means ignoring all your other friends and interests in order to dive deep down into this particular shared world. Unsurprisingly, this eventually ended in Drama and Friendship Disaster. (Not, like, Beautiful Creatures level drama, this is not that kind of book, but the kind of drama that for sure feels extremely intense and terrible when you are twelve.)
Now Olivia has bumped into Ashlin again on a week-long art study trip to Florence, which leads to a couple of important realizations:
- maybe all the things she had defined as Definitely Ashlin's Fault as a tiny angry junior high schooler were actually ... perhaps .... both their faults?
- Olivia is still extremely gay for Ashlin
It's a quiet and thoughtful story, not particularly interested in standard romance beats but very deeply interested in the joys and balances of extremely intense relationships -- how to make space for overwhelming feelings in your life without losing the rest of it and vice versa, how to learn from and avoid past mistakes. And the mistakes are VERY RELATABLE; a lot of the juggling-social-dynamics scenes in particular, both in the past and the present, made me had to put down the e-reader for a second in an 'oh god too real' sort of way.
Without spoilers, some of those questions remain in the ending, but that's OK -- they're big questions and I really like the space this novella provides its protagonists for figuring them out.
In junior high, Ashlin moved to Olivia's school, where the two immediately struck up the kind of obsessive preteen friendship that sometimes means ignoring all your other friends and interests in order to dive deep down into this particular shared world. Unsurprisingly, this eventually ended in Drama and Friendship Disaster. (Not, like, Beautiful Creatures level drama, this is not that kind of book, but the kind of drama that for sure feels extremely intense and terrible when you are twelve.)
Now Olivia has bumped into Ashlin again on a week-long art study trip to Florence, which leads to a couple of important realizations:
- maybe all the things she had defined as Definitely Ashlin's Fault as a tiny angry junior high schooler were actually ... perhaps .... both their faults?
- Olivia is still extremely gay for Ashlin
It's a quiet and thoughtful story, not particularly interested in standard romance beats but very deeply interested in the joys and balances of extremely intense relationships -- how to make space for overwhelming feelings in your life without losing the rest of it and vice versa, how to learn from and avoid past mistakes. And the mistakes are VERY RELATABLE; a lot of the juggling-social-dynamics scenes in particular, both in the past and the present, made me had to put down the e-reader for a second in an 'oh god too real' sort of way.
Without spoilers, some of those questions remain in the ending, but that's OK -- they're big questions and I really like the space this novella provides its protagonists for figuring them out.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-02 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-02 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-02 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-02 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-03 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-03 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-03 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-03 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-08 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-09 02:49 pm (UTC)