Book four and running out of steam....
Jun. 8th, 2008 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_schrapnellBook-talking steam, that is, not the reading. Anyway, despite my often-professed huge admiration for E. Lockhart, the only book of hers I'd not got hold of was Fly on the Wall, though I'm not sure where I saw the things about it that stopped me grabbing it. Possibly it was someone (not a teen, at a wild guess) who disapproved of the constant discussion of all the 'gherkins' Gretchen sees during her week as a fly in the boy's locker room at her school. Or also possibly, it was someone who found her admitted objectification of the boys' bodies she sees there objectionable - she does give grades, and a 'classification chart of the male booty'. But in a way it was nice to have this as a totally unexpected surprise, as I hadn't even realised it was published over here, much less was I expecting to find it when I did my short detour into the bookshop yesterday while restocking on other kinds of provisions...
I can see that some people would find the book offensive - and perhaps if they weren't offended by Gretchen's initial enthusiastically voyeuristic reaction to the naked male bodies she gets to see when she inexplicably finds herself waking up as a (literal) fly on the wall, they'd find the 'gherkins' and 'biscuits' and 'booty' offensive in the other way. I actually thought at first that 'gherkin' was just the way a teen might talk to herself, though I've no idea if that actually is an equivalent of something like 'willy' over here, but when the boys started using it too, thought it was probably not just that. But though it could have been annoyingly euphemistic, I thought it was worked quite well as done here.
When the first guy comes into the locker room, he promptly strips off, and Gretchen explains how she's never seen a naked guy really, aside from her father, who stopped letting her into the bathroom with him 10 years ago, and flies down for 'close-up gherkin-information-gathering right away'. And after a lot of observing, and some lusting, and a bit of panicking over her transformation and how she'll get back to being human, and no 'close-up' of the guy on whom she has a crush (who turns out to be really insecure about his body), she starts focusing more on the interactions between the guys, and learns something about her best friend - and herself - she didn't expect to.
The first section of the book is called 'life as an artificial redhead' - Gretchen, (whose Chinese father and Jewish mother have just told her they're divorcing), goes to a special arty school in Manhattan, where the only thing you can't do is appear normal, though there's a depressingly proscriptive nature to all that 'difference', which goes from the hair/clothing of the students to the inability of her art teacher to accept Gretchen's comic-book style drawing, to a lot of homophobic talk (more significant in some guys than in others, but finally challenged in a great way by one of them). The second section, 'life as a vermin', obviously tells of the time she spends as a fly. The third, 'life as a superhero' covers from when she wakes up in her own bed, no longer a fly, and I thought the way the comic-book theme was brought in to the end was very clever. Nicely ironic too, and Gretchen's ability to say what she's been wanting to say all along, both in her drawing class, and to the guy she likes made for a funny and cheerful ending. She's a genuinely nice kid, though she's got a bit stuck into self-absorbed shyness and self-consciousness at the beginning of the book, and I liked her and the guy she likes a lot, and there was that super-intelligent observance of social interactions E. Lockhart does so well, so I was well-satisfied with this one.
I can see that some people would find the book offensive - and perhaps if they weren't offended by Gretchen's initial enthusiastically voyeuristic reaction to the naked male bodies she gets to see when she inexplicably finds herself waking up as a (literal) fly on the wall, they'd find the 'gherkins' and 'biscuits' and 'booty' offensive in the other way. I actually thought at first that 'gherkin' was just the way a teen might talk to herself, though I've no idea if that actually is an equivalent of something like 'willy' over here, but when the boys started using it too, thought it was probably not just that. But though it could have been annoyingly euphemistic, I thought it was worked quite well as done here.
When the first guy comes into the locker room, he promptly strips off, and Gretchen explains how she's never seen a naked guy really, aside from her father, who stopped letting her into the bathroom with him 10 years ago, and flies down for 'close-up gherkin-information-gathering right away'. And after a lot of observing, and some lusting, and a bit of panicking over her transformation and how she'll get back to being human, and no 'close-up' of the guy on whom she has a crush (who turns out to be really insecure about his body), she starts focusing more on the interactions between the guys, and learns something about her best friend - and herself - she didn't expect to.
The first section of the book is called 'life as an artificial redhead' - Gretchen, (whose Chinese father and Jewish mother have just told her they're divorcing), goes to a special arty school in Manhattan, where the only thing you can't do is appear normal, though there's a depressingly proscriptive nature to all that 'difference', which goes from the hair/clothing of the students to the inability of her art teacher to accept Gretchen's comic-book style drawing, to a lot of homophobic talk (more significant in some guys than in others, but finally challenged in a great way by one of them). The second section, 'life as a vermin', obviously tells of the time she spends as a fly. The third, 'life as a superhero' covers from when she wakes up in her own bed, no longer a fly, and I thought the way the comic-book theme was brought in to the end was very clever. Nicely ironic too, and Gretchen's ability to say what she's been wanting to say all along, both in her drawing class, and to the guy she likes made for a funny and cheerful ending. She's a genuinely nice kid, though she's got a bit stuck into self-absorbed shyness and self-consciousness at the beginning of the book, and I liked her and the guy she likes a lot, and there was that super-intelligent observance of social interactions E. Lockhart does so well, so I was well-satisfied with this one.
