(no subject)

[skygiants]

By the Book: A Novel of Prose and Cons is a high school rom-com targeted towards people who like a.) friendship stories b.) sibling stories c.) a constant, affectionate stream of references to nineteenth-century literature.

...it is me, I am that person, I think I got about 90% of them. (Somehow I've managed to completely escape Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)

The premise: naive, overeducated Mary has just transferred from her tiny inderdisciplinary program for professor's kids to a more traditional high school. After a rocky start when her best-friend-of-convenience from her old school decides to ditch her, she is absorbed into a clique of new friends ...

... who are, despite the skepticism of some of the more high-school-genre-savvy members of Mary's family, in fact genuinely nice and well-meant and interested in being her friends! The main conflict centers around the fact that Mary's adoption into the group comes via her habit of mapping bad high school boyfriends onto bad boyfriends of nineteenth-century literature, and as a result she struggles with feeling like she must remain a Font of Literary Wisdom, especially when the first boy she identified as Bad turns out of course to be both Pretty Cool Actually and Kind Of Into Her.

The boy in question is indeed perfectly sweet and I have no beef with him, but the real heart of the book is very much the story of Mary learning how to model genuine friendship and believe that her new friends group might like her for her own sake and not just because they've all really bought into bibliomancy via Austen.

I'm also very fond of Mary's large array of siblings, who are all involved in their own sub-conflicts. My favorites, of course, are the Cool College Twins who are having lesbian Shakespeare society drama, because I am always going to be here for lesbian Shakespeare society drama, but the sarcastic baby brother is also charming and Mary's changing relationships with all of them as she undergoes her coming-of-age are extremely sweet.

The book overall is really very warm-hearted about all its characters -- even the Mean Former Best Friend plotline is mostly an exploration of how people sometimes grow out of each other and it's really not anybody's fault -- which makes it a very soothing read, especially if you also happen to find it soothing to play the game of Name That Brit-Lit Plot Point every chapter. (I do think Mary is wrong about some of the lit, but this is to be expected of a fifteen-year-old; a person can't really be expected to appreciate Moby Dick until they are older. Also this is vastly hypocritical of me to say given that I still haven't actually read Moby Dick myself.)

Comments

[seekingferret]

I keep meaning to read Tess of the D'urbervilles, Hardy's one of those writers where you know that even if you find the characters and plot obnoxious or morally offensive, at least the prose will be stunningly beautiful. But this book sounds fun.

[starlady]

Tess is the Hardy I like best, though I can't say it's any more cheerful than his other books.

[melita66]

Tess was one of the assigned-in-high-school books I hated the most. With a lot more reading under my belt, I'm very character-oriented so naive, beautiful Tess and the other people in the book did nothing for me. The descriptions of pastoral Britain were not enough to make up for it.

Main Street, on the other hand, which was hated by everyone else in the class, I could appreciate. Not like, but appreciate. City-bred young woman marries country doctor and finds herself in a stifling Minnesota plains small town. My maternal grandparents lived in a similar town in Ohio, but my mother settled in a big city and become more cosmopolitan.

But yeah, I could see exactly how that situation could happen.

Thank ghu, my grad school boyfriend broke up with me. Beyond other faults (only nonfiction matters), his goal was to move to a small town just like the one he grew up in. However, so far he hasn't managed that. He works for a beltway bandit company near DC. (Beltway bandits include contractors who work for the US federal government in various capacities)

[skygiants]

I've never actually read a single Hardy! I know a lot of people who had him on the high school curriculum but for whatever reason mine completely skipped over him.

[seekingferret]

The Mayor of Casterbridge is every bit as delightfully OTT soapy as sovay remembers.

[rushthatspeaks]

I suspect you would love Moby-Dick. I think you would get on very well with both Melville's sense of humor and his six jillion whale facts.

[sovay]

I think you would get on very well with both Melville's sense of humor and his six jillion whale facts.

Seconded.

(I am very fond of Moby-Dick, but I expect this to be obvious from space.)

[skygiants]

I'm constantly torn about Moby-Dick, because on the one hand I do think I probably would get on very well with it and on the other hand I've enjoyed so much the process of absorbing a lot of Moby Dick knowledge entirely through weird transformative products such as Moby Dick: The Musical and Mieville's Railsea that it almost feels like cheating to read the actual book ....

[rushthatspeaks]

I mean, I can assure you that Moby-Dick itself is far stranger than any transformation or derivative of it I've run across, and I say that as a person who deeply loves Railsea.

[starlady]

I haven't read Moby Dick yet, but I have a copy waiting in storage in New Jersey and the twitter bot makes me wish I had it in hand. To say nothing of the fact that the whale is a horse, etc etc.

[skygiants]

Emma's tweet is my favorite Moby-Dick transformative work.

[sovay]

(Somehow I've managed to completely escape Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)

I tried to read it in high school when I was the only person in my friend group not taking the standard English class in British literature and everyone I knew kept leaving the western canon lying around. I bounced completely for reasons I don't even remember, which is unhelpful every time the internet goes through a spasm of Angel Clare memes. I did read Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, I want to say during rehearsals for Into the Woods. Everything I can recall about the plot suggests a level of melodrama approaching daytime soaps, but it took me years to notice, so it must have been done well. I also remember liking Hardy's poetry.

[skygiants]

I keep thinking I ought to read Hardy some day, if only to get a sense of what his prose is actually like, but every time I remember another Dickens I haven't read instead and the thing is I really like Dickens.

[sophia_sol]

Oooh this book sounds like exactly my jam!

[skygiants]

It's so cute! Nineteenth-century lit has so many lessons about bad men but how many lessons does it have about .... friendship???

[dolorosa_12]

Oooh, this sounds excellent. I think I've just found my next book to read!

[skygiants]

Filled with fond flashbacks to my high school Brit-lit book club and the time a friend asked me to read Jane Eyre to see whether the dark secret in the attic was something too scary for her ....

[larryhammer]

This ... may be my jam. And jelly. And PB ...

[skygiants]

I, too, have often fallen into the trap of treating social interactions exclusively as an opportunity to tell other people the plots of books!

[osprey_archer]

This sounds delightful! Curse you for adding to my TBR list once again!

[skygiants]

I am as always here to help! :D

[landofnowhere]

This sounds pretty charming!

(Also, what is it about contemporary YA titles punning on "Pros and Cons": there's also The Pros of Cons, which is also charming and holds together quite well for a three-author collaboration!)