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Jun. 10th, 2021 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA little while back aquamirage remarked to me on how unexpected it was that not only were there two YA Twelfth Night retellings that came out in 2019, but, somehow, both of them were good?
I of course had at the time read the first of 2019's queer YA Twelfth Nights -- it's Preston Norton's bodyswapping theater hijinks book Where I End And You Begin and it's delightful -- but I'd never heard of the other, Julia Drake's The Last True Poets of the Sea.
Obviously, as always,aquamirage was absolutely correct; The Last True Poets of the Sea is also an extremely good Twelfth Night book, in a very different way than Where I End And You Begin.
The thing that makes both these books successful as Twelfth Night books, I think, is that they don't make any attempt to retell the story straight (no pun intended/okay some pun intended) -- instead they pull out some key thematic blocks, turn them sideways, and put them back together again in a way that creates something new and vibrant out of them. One of the key theme-blocks in both these books is "I'm figuring out something about myself by way of a messy queer love polygon" and another is "I've lost my sibling and I need to find my way back to them;" the third major Twelfth Night theme-block that's unique to Last True Poets is, of course, the beauty, danger, and transformative power of the sesa.
(Hey, sidenote, I've told Twitter my best worst bit of lit-crit but not DW, I think: you know how Shakespeare's Orsino and Shakespeare's Orlando are almost the same character? They're both depressed and confusedly in love with a gendershifting hero/ine, but can tell them apart because OrSIno appears in Twelfth Night which is a SEA play, and OrLANDo appears in As You Like It which is a forest play aka a LAND play .... but everything changed when Orflameo attacked!)
ANYWAY. The actual plot of Last True Poets of the Sea is that Violet's younger brother Sam has just attempted suicide, which has had the side effect of drawing their parents' attention sharply to the fact that Violet's wild party-girl lifestyle might be symptomatic of some similarly self-destructive impulses. As a result, while Sam goes to inpatient counseling in Vermont, Viola gets sent to stay for a summer with her uncle Toby in Lyric, Maine -- a town founded by her great-grandmother, who, according to town lore, was the only survivor of the wreck of the good ship Lyric, and then had an epic romance with Viola's wealthy great-grandfather while undercover on his estate disguised as a boy.
When they were little, Viola and Sam spent their summers in Lyric trying to find the legendary and possibly-imaginary wreck of their great-grandmother's ship; now Viola decides she's going to give the search one more try, partly as part of her vague plan to impress her new friend (and crush) Orion by impressing his best friend (and crush) (and now unfortunately also Viola's crush) amateur-shipwreck-historian Liv, and partly as the only gift she feels like she has it in her to give Sam.
Against the weight of Violet's guilt and self-sabotage, the mysterious and fantastical backstory of Lyric's founding mythos and Violet's quest to discover it provides a sort of ... what's the opposite of an anchor? A buoy? Given its subject matter, the book could have quite easily sunk into melancholy, but the shipwreck of the Lyric (ironically ... but also with thematic appropriateness ...) propels the whole story upwards and balances the heaviness of the subject matter with a kind of buoyancy and playfulness.
It's also just a beautifully written book, and all the characters in it are messy, complicated, and care about each other tremendously. I don't know how we used up our entire stock of good Twelfth Night novel adaptations in 2019 and I expect we won't have another as good as either Where I End And You Begin or The Last True Poets of the Sea for like a decade, but given how good they both are, I think that's a trade I'm willing to make.
aquamirage remarked to me on how unexpected it was that not only were there two YA Twelfth Night retellings that came out in 2019, but, somehow, both of them were good?I of course had at the time read the first of 2019's queer YA Twelfth Nights -- it's Preston Norton's bodyswapping theater hijinks book Where I End And You Begin and it's delightful -- but I'd never heard of the other, Julia Drake's The Last True Poets of the Sea.
Obviously, as always,
aquamirage was absolutely correct; The Last True Poets of the Sea is also an extremely good Twelfth Night book, in a very different way than Where I End And You Begin.The thing that makes both these books successful as Twelfth Night books, I think, is that they don't make any attempt to retell the story straight (no pun intended/okay some pun intended) -- instead they pull out some key thematic blocks, turn them sideways, and put them back together again in a way that creates something new and vibrant out of them. One of the key theme-blocks in both these books is "I'm figuring out something about myself by way of a messy queer love polygon" and another is "I've lost my sibling and I need to find my way back to them;" the third major Twelfth Night theme-block that's unique to Last True Poets is, of course, the beauty, danger, and transformative power of the sesa.
(Hey, sidenote, I've told Twitter my best worst bit of lit-crit but not DW, I think: you know how Shakespeare's Orsino and Shakespeare's Orlando are almost the same character? They're both depressed and confusedly in love with a gendershifting hero/ine, but can tell them apart because OrSIno appears in Twelfth Night which is a SEA play, and OrLANDo appears in As You Like It which is a forest play aka a LAND play .... but everything changed when Orflameo attacked!)
ANYWAY. The actual plot of Last True Poets of the Sea is that Violet's younger brother Sam has just attempted suicide, which has had the side effect of drawing their parents' attention sharply to the fact that Violet's wild party-girl lifestyle might be symptomatic of some similarly self-destructive impulses. As a result, while Sam goes to inpatient counseling in Vermont, Viola gets sent to stay for a summer with her uncle Toby in Lyric, Maine -- a town founded by her great-grandmother, who, according to town lore, was the only survivor of the wreck of the good ship Lyric, and then had an epic romance with Viola's wealthy great-grandfather while undercover on his estate disguised as a boy.
When they were little, Viola and Sam spent their summers in Lyric trying to find the legendary and possibly-imaginary wreck of their great-grandmother's ship; now Viola decides she's going to give the search one more try, partly as part of her vague plan to impress her new friend (and crush) Orion by impressing his best friend (and crush) (and now unfortunately also Viola's crush) amateur-shipwreck-historian Liv, and partly as the only gift she feels like she has it in her to give Sam.
Against the weight of Violet's guilt and self-sabotage, the mysterious and fantastical backstory of Lyric's founding mythos and Violet's quest to discover it provides a sort of ... what's the opposite of an anchor? A buoy? Given its subject matter, the book could have quite easily sunk into melancholy, but the shipwreck of the Lyric (ironically ... but also with thematic appropriateness ...) propels the whole story upwards and balances the heaviness of the subject matter with a kind of buoyancy and playfulness.
It's also just a beautifully written book, and all the characters in it are messy, complicated, and care about each other tremendously. I don't know how we used up our entire stock of good Twelfth Night novel adaptations in 2019 and I expect we won't have another as good as either Where I End And You Begin or The Last True Poets of the Sea for like a decade, but given how good they both are, I think that's a trade I'm willing to make.
