The Untimely Demise of the Home Schooled Girl

What is it about the home schooled girl that drives writers to make her a tragic heroine? Is there something about her independence added to her quirky cuteness that dooms her in young adult literature? Do male writers, ashamed of their guilty crushes on these characters, feel compelled to do away with them? Why does the male protagonist betray the home schooled girl? Why is he so terrified by her careless disregard of social teen-age norms?

I've been thinking about this after reading three (well... four) titles that on the surface have nothing in common - Shakespeare's The Tempest, M.T. Anderson's Feed*, and Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl (and Love, Stargirl too).

My English 102 students have been reading Shakespeare's play about the magical events that occur when a boat-load of Italian nobels are shipwrecked on an island inhabitted by the magician (and former Italian nobel) Prospero, his servants Ariel and Caliban, and his daughter Miranda - who has been raised and schooled on the island by no one but her father. My class keeps coming back to their discussion of Miranda who perplexes them. Why is she so docile? How can she seem so well-educated and well-spoken and still be easily directed, first by her father and then her love-interest, the recently-stranded Ferdinand? Is her marriage to Ferdinand a blessing or a type of imprisonment? All of the characters consider her to be the perfect image of a young woman, and yet she seems so unreal.

Violet, the heroine of Feed is likewise "too perfect." Anderson's setting is a futuristic and apocolyptic world where the internet is implanted in the brains of those who can afford it and consumerism runs amok destroying what is left of our fragile ecosystem, The book is masterfully constructed and the teen male narrator, Titus, wins over the readers with his honest voice. Titus falls for the homeschooled Violet, who questions the fate of her world while trying to participate in it. She, like Miranda, is the "perfect" girl - beautiful, smart, funny, in love with Titus, and ultimately killed by the faulty internet implant. Her death was terrible... mostly because Titus has broken up with her because she is too needy and "uncool" - oh, Titus, how could you?

Spinelli's Stargirl doesn't die (and thank goodness has a sequel) but like Violet, she is betrayed by her guy, Leo, who when faced with the choice of dumping Stargirl and becoming unpopular, he chooses his reputation - et tu, Leo? It is only when Stargirl has moved out of state that he realizes what he has lost.

Won't someone save these girls?

* Excuse me, have you read the Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing? If not, you should stop reading this blog this instant and go find yourself a copy and begin reading it right away.

Unfortunate

"Let’s start by saying I have a lot of money. I’ve acquired it by writing children’s books about terrible things happening to orphans, and this seems like such a crazy and possibly monstrous way of acquiring money that I give a lot of it away." - Daniel Handler in a June 10, 2007 New York Times article.

He's right. There is something monstrous about the success of The Series of Unfortunate Events, which Handler writes under his pseudonymn of Lemony Snicket, just like there is something monstrous about The Basic Eight (Handler's first novel, the tale of a psychotic teen who goes on a killing spree with a croquette mallet - which is, not surprisingly and unmistakably, for adults, or more specifically adults with a taste for snarky, funny, and graphically violent prose).

I'll happily admit that I find that snarkiness to be delightfully entertaining, in both his adult and children's book, but I am aware that this is a guilty pleasure. One can't truely delight in these books without having a slightly queasy feeling about the nastiness of his characters' peril.

Ah... how unfortunate...

*** Another quandry... should one read the books for Brett Helquists pictures? Or listen to Tim Curry's recorded book narration?

Owl In Love

Kindl, Patrice. Owl in Love. Houghton, 1993.

My 13 year old daughter, Aitana, would love this book, but she won't read it. She said the cover looks creepy.

Why does it look creepy? Is it the greyed tones of the girl's face on the cover? Is it the overlay of the owl's wing across her brow? Is it the blurb that reads "School girl by day, owl by night..." Aitana won't say (which I suppose is a new standard for my now teenage daughter).

Why would she love it? Here are my top five reasons (with SPOILERS - be warned!):

1. The main character is named Owl Tycho, which is clearly a cool name.


2. Owl is a sulky, ostracized teenage girl, so my daughter should empathize entirely with her.


3. Owl is magic; she is the daughter of witches and a shape changer - again, clearly cool.


4. Owl's love interest is a dark and damaged boy, Aitana's favorite flavor!


5. Kindl has written this beautifully. The first person narration may at first seem stilted, until one realizes that Owl is a girl with a 18th-century soul forced to negotiate her way through a 20th-century world. Owl's struggles as she is befriended by Dawn, a wonderfully complex character in her own right, are the real heart of this novel and develop questions of friendship to which any teen can relate.

A Continental Flavor

I've recently listened to two books on CD, both narrator by Patricia Conolly, that confirmed a sneaking suspicion I've had regarding the difference between Continental European writing for children and US, or even British, writing for the same audience.

Silvana De Mari's The Last Dragon and Eva Ibbotson's The Dragonfly Pool couldn't be two more different types of books. The first is a fantasy which tells the story of Yorsh, the last elf, and the humans with whom he interacts, and the last dragon. It is high fantasy, spanning the lives of two generations, with only lightly veiled commentary on human politics and quite a bit of wry humor.

The second is historical fiction, though Ibbotson is probably better known for her fantasy. It is the story of Tally, a girl who is sent from London to a "progressive school" at the start of World War II, and then travels to the fictionalized "Bergania" which seems to hearken back to Ibottson's own native Austria. The narrative then switches to focus on Karil, the prince of the soon invaded country.

What is the similarity between these two?

I think it is pacing. Like Cornelia Funke, both Di Mari and Ibbotson take their time telling this story. The pleasure in these tales is not the breathtaking action scenes, but the overlays and reflections as we move from one scene to the next, delighting in the clever foreshadowing and backtracking and subtle humor. I wonder if this is a "continental flavor?"