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rushthatspeaksSo after having reread all the Anastasia books, it occurred to me to wonder what Lois Lowry has been doing recently. I know she went through a phase of serious-and-relevant (and mostly pretty good) YA-- The Giver, Gathering Blue, etc.-- but that was a few years ago and I hadn't been paying attention since.
There was a new one in the children's section at the bookstore, so I sat down with it.
The Birthday Ball has illustrations by Jules Feiffer, and that is absolutely the last good thing I have to say about it, and I hope to God she gets over this and returns to her senses.
This is a self-conscious fairytale, the sort of thing whose genre model is Thurber's The 13 Clocks or, more closely, A.A. Milne's Once on a Time. Only it's terrible. There's the princess, and her family's ridiculous number of names, and the awful suitors she is trying to avoid, and the young schoolmaster she is obviously going to marry after the requisite rounds of mistaken identity etc. etc., but the thing is, Lowry clearly delineates a world in which every single member of the aristocracy is repulsive, autocratic, dictatorial, and stark raving bonkers but forgets to make the princess the exception. This is a book in which if I could have entered the text I would have started scattering copies of either The Communist Manifesto or The Fountainhead around indiscriminately because any system of government is better than being ruled by people who are, in a couple of cases literally, walking fart jokes. And everyone who isn't an aristocrat is afflicted with a curious case of not yet having started a violent revolution. I would think that this is a case of Lowry having some kind of meta joke on this genre but the text is not coherent enough to be that self-aware.
In short: every single character totally unlikeable, society completely repellent, jokes unfunny, morals clankingly obvious, plot silly, wordplay unplayful, what the fuck happened to the writer who wrote A Summer to Die?
Gah.
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There was a new one in the children's section at the bookstore, so I sat down with it.
The Birthday Ball has illustrations by Jules Feiffer, and that is absolutely the last good thing I have to say about it, and I hope to God she gets over this and returns to her senses.
This is a self-conscious fairytale, the sort of thing whose genre model is Thurber's The 13 Clocks or, more closely, A.A. Milne's Once on a Time. Only it's terrible. There's the princess, and her family's ridiculous number of names, and the awful suitors she is trying to avoid, and the young schoolmaster she is obviously going to marry after the requisite rounds of mistaken identity etc. etc., but the thing is, Lowry clearly delineates a world in which every single member of the aristocracy is repulsive, autocratic, dictatorial, and stark raving bonkers but forgets to make the princess the exception. This is a book in which if I could have entered the text I would have started scattering copies of either The Communist Manifesto or The Fountainhead around indiscriminately because any system of government is better than being ruled by people who are, in a couple of cases literally, walking fart jokes. And everyone who isn't an aristocrat is afflicted with a curious case of not yet having started a violent revolution. I would think that this is a case of Lowry having some kind of meta joke on this genre but the text is not coherent enough to be that self-aware.
In short: every single character totally unlikeable, society completely repellent, jokes unfunny, morals clankingly obvious, plot silly, wordplay unplayful, what the fuck happened to the writer who wrote A Summer to Die?
Gah.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
