The Diamond of Drury Lane

Well, I've read worse.  Far worse.

Won't say much more (oh yes - The Diamond of Drury Lane, by Julia Golding) than that, but I do wonder how it won the Nestlé Children's Book Prize, the Waterstone's Children Book Prize, and was on the shortlist for the Costa Children's Book Award.  (I was stunned to see that Julia Golding had had 10 books published in two years, and I've no idea if that discovery added to my frustrated feeling that she could have done a better job on it had she really worked at it.)

It's all rollicking enough, in a Georgian London sort of way, with our heroine, Cat Royal, living in the Theatre Royal where she was abandoned as a baby.  Add Sheridan - taking delivery of and protecting a diamond - Pedro, a young musician (talented enough to reduce all listeners to floods of tears, or instant emotional state of his choice) who's a freed slave - and Johnny, the handsome young prompt 'with a secret' - the Duke of something or other and his two very broadminded children, criminal gangs, oh, etc, etc...   I'd probably have taken it all much more warmly had Cat not repeatedly been praised for her intelligence and quick wit, and then behaved so stupidly.  Or had she not got time after time into a seriously dangerous situation, realised with a sinking heart that she'd now made an enemy and would no longer be able to go about in safety, only to trot off with whatever highly valuable/incriminating thing she wants to bring somewhere, shaking her red curls in disdain at the idea that the enemy would keep her from going where she wanted to, thank you very kindly!

Funnily enough, a passage which was a big bounce-off was another over-the-head-of-the-child-reader joke about Jane Austen, given that two posts ago I was saying how I'd enjoyed just that very thing in The Penderwicks on Gardam Street.  But this one--  Cat is invited by the Duke's daughter to come to the house with Pedro, to entertain (in an odd between employee and friend status), so she reads to the guests from her writing (implied to be the book we're reading -ish).  The Duke's daughter is 17, his son, Lord Francis, a couple of years younger, the guests all 'young people'.

"Well, it certainly was unorthodox," said a sweet-looking girl with a heart-shaped face. "Though perhaps the subject matter is a little unbecoming for a lady.  I would have expected Miss Royal to begin with some witty general observation, a wryly expressed universal truth, for example, on love and courtship - the usual themes for the female pen."

"Oh, Jane!" protested Lord Francis.  "How can you be so dull? We don't want none of that missish stuff."

Gah and double gah.

There are five of the Cat Royal books now, I think, but I've done my duty in finishing this one, and they'll continue to get along swimmingly without me. 

Book four and running out of steam....

Book-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.

 

Book five and the end for me...

My 48 hours aren't actually up until 11, so two more hours to go, but I'm going to post this and then call it quits, doing my final tally of hours and books read tomorrow morning, while Younger Daughter is doing maths paper 2.  (Only 1 in 5 leaving cert students are doing honours maths, I discovered yesterday, which I thought surprisingly low.)

Anyway, my fifth finished book was Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and I really, seriously can't think of anything new - or needful - to say about it, given its fame.  I hadn't realised that it ended so abruptly, and unfinished-feelingly, though I knew little about it before starting, and maybe that was just me, and I could have got the second book two, so I should have been warned by that at least.  But it was very impressive, and very well done, and I liked the artwork, and despite apparently not being a graphic novel type of person, I was still very glad to have read it. 

That's all I've got (aside from an oncoming flattening headache) for now - sorry!