![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_schrapnellThis is rambling for the sake of getting a little bit of my thoughts (to use the term loosely) - well, a tiny bit thought out, and nothing more.
I never got to write properly about Maryrose Wood's Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love, the book being banned from middle school libraries on the basis of its title rather than contents, to the dismay of many. And of course, I agreed with all the child lit bloggers who had read it and said it was sweet and funny and smart and ought to be pushed at younger teens with both hands, instead of being kept away from them. (Okay, they didn't say the last bit in those words, but they might have. And I did.) No huge traumas, but not unrealistically la-la either - with many of the families broken in one way or another, and people adapting and often thriving in their own ways. It's a book I think a lot of younger teen boys would like too, if only it could be slipped to them so nobody would ever see them reading it - the look at girls trying to figure out how boys work rang very true.
Anyway, I guess it would be considered pretty definitively a 'girls' book', and maybe - I guess - younger teen chick lit. Other than that, I would be apologising for putting it together with Opal in the subject line, as they seem to have very little in common. Though there are a few books I could also say might be classified together with Opal but have little other than the surface similarities in common : Jaclyn Moriarty, possibly (would anyone call them YA chick lit? [1 minute later] Oh, for goodness sake - having just gone to look for definitions of chick lit on wiki, I found Speak on a list of Teen Chick lit. Guess I don't need to worry too much about the term being necessarily derogatory!); E. Lockhart, presumably the books from which Viswanathan plagiarized (though I'm not that much of a Princess Diaries fan and haven't read Megan McCafferty).
Anyway, what I was wondering about was the difference between these, and what makes some books very light, funny reads without making them at best mind candy, or at worst - well, just bad. And I've been reading How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life in dribs and drabs since I found it, out of sheer curiosity - now turned into analytical interest. And I've been thinking somewhere in the back of my head that it was just bad on virtually every page, until page 225 (the bottom of), when it suddenly rang true. And that page? A scene in which Opal - everything gone to hell - loses her temper at her parents for pushing her so relentlessly and not listening at all to how she might be feeling. I've no intention of getting into any kind of psychoanalytical mode here, but given the fact that Opal is at least said to be semi-autobiographical, it was rather striking. (Viswnathan has, of course, denied that her parents themselves put the kind of pressure on her that Opal's did.)
But, as I said, what I'm really interested in is what distinguishes the funny, easy-to-read YA/children's books from this one - or does for me, as Opal didn't win that contract entirely for the young author's sellable story. And it got some good reviews, hard as I find it to understand that. I guess it might relate to an idea about Dickens' characters that has stayed with me (long after I forgot the critic who said it! On an OU cassette for a course years ago) - that though they weren't at all realistic in the classic realist novel, mimetic sense, they had psychological realism. And that seems right for the slightly over-the-top characters in the funny novels that work - you may not believe that there's someone out there exactly like them, in that exact set of circumstances, but yet the slight caricature or unlikely conditions contains or is built around something that feels like perfect sense psychologically. Opal never generated that kind of partial willing suspension of disbelief required to take the characters or situations lightly, as other books manage to do.
And of course part of it was just that there wasn't much original or interesting here even without the duplicated passages. The idea of HOWGAL was a minor twist thrown onto a plot like so many others (the film Mean Girls in particular - though as this wasn't name-checked along with all the other films and TV shows Opal had to watch, I'm guessing it wasn't out when Opal was written). And what on earth could be more boring than repeated mentions of the famous brands of clothes, shoes and accessories someone's wearing, really? Certainly there's no interest to be had in Opal's ethnic background - even her mentions of Indian food are generally dull, for heaven's sake! Compare the (on-the-whole) wonderful Born Confused for that - or, as Opal sometimes feels like a film-script masquerading as a novel, Bend It like Beckham. Those are fun. (And make me hungry.)
End of Part a Half. I've just been told that the storm outside has apparently knocked out the cable TV, so maybe I'll post this, unedited and half-baked, before it blows away the internet too. (Bell and I were a bit freaked earlier - though I'd have loved walking in that wind, on that mild a night, had there been a few less tall trees on our route. Tall trees and power lines... )
I never got to write properly about Maryrose Wood's Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love, the book being banned from middle school libraries on the basis of its title rather than contents, to the dismay of many. And of course, I agreed with all the child lit bloggers who had read it and said it was sweet and funny and smart and ought to be pushed at younger teens with both hands, instead of being kept away from them. (Okay, they didn't say the last bit in those words, but they might have. And I did.) No huge traumas, but not unrealistically la-la either - with many of the families broken in one way or another, and people adapting and often thriving in their own ways. It's a book I think a lot of younger teen boys would like too, if only it could be slipped to them so nobody would ever see them reading it - the look at girls trying to figure out how boys work rang very true.
Anyway, I guess it would be considered pretty definitively a 'girls' book', and maybe - I guess - younger teen chick lit. Other than that, I would be apologising for putting it together with Opal in the subject line, as they seem to have very little in common. Though there are a few books I could also say might be classified together with Opal but have little other than the surface similarities in common : Jaclyn Moriarty, possibly (would anyone call them YA chick lit? [1 minute later] Oh, for goodness sake - having just gone to look for definitions of chick lit on wiki, I found Speak on a list of Teen Chick lit. Guess I don't need to worry too much about the term being necessarily derogatory!); E. Lockhart, presumably the books from which Viswanathan plagiarized (though I'm not that much of a Princess Diaries fan and haven't read Megan McCafferty).
Anyway, what I was wondering about was the difference between these, and what makes some books very light, funny reads without making them at best mind candy, or at worst - well, just bad. And I've been reading How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life in dribs and drabs since I found it, out of sheer curiosity - now turned into analytical interest. And I've been thinking somewhere in the back of my head that it was just bad on virtually every page, until page 225 (the bottom of), when it suddenly rang true. And that page? A scene in which Opal - everything gone to hell - loses her temper at her parents for pushing her so relentlessly and not listening at all to how she might be feeling. I've no intention of getting into any kind of psychoanalytical mode here, but given the fact that Opal is at least said to be semi-autobiographical, it was rather striking. (Viswnathan has, of course, denied that her parents themselves put the kind of pressure on her that Opal's did.)
But, as I said, what I'm really interested in is what distinguishes the funny, easy-to-read YA/children's books from this one - or does for me, as Opal didn't win that contract entirely for the young author's sellable story. And it got some good reviews, hard as I find it to understand that. I guess it might relate to an idea about Dickens' characters that has stayed with me (long after I forgot the critic who said it! On an OU cassette for a course years ago) - that though they weren't at all realistic in the classic realist novel, mimetic sense, they had psychological realism. And that seems right for the slightly over-the-top characters in the funny novels that work - you may not believe that there's someone out there exactly like them, in that exact set of circumstances, but yet the slight caricature or unlikely conditions contains or is built around something that feels like perfect sense psychologically. Opal never generated that kind of partial willing suspension of disbelief required to take the characters or situations lightly, as other books manage to do.
And of course part of it was just that there wasn't much original or interesting here even without the duplicated passages. The idea of HOWGAL was a minor twist thrown onto a plot like so many others (the film Mean Girls in particular - though as this wasn't name-checked along with all the other films and TV shows Opal had to watch, I'm guessing it wasn't out when Opal was written). And what on earth could be more boring than repeated mentions of the famous brands of clothes, shoes and accessories someone's wearing, really? Certainly there's no interest to be had in Opal's ethnic background - even her mentions of Indian food are generally dull, for heaven's sake! Compare the (on-the-whole) wonderful Born Confused for that - or, as Opal sometimes feels like a film-script masquerading as a novel, Bend It like Beckham. Those are fun. (And make me hungry.)
End of Part a Half. I've just been told that the storm outside has apparently knocked out the cable TV, so maybe I'll post this, unedited and half-baked, before it blows away the internet too. (Bell and I were a bit freaked earlier - though I'd have loved walking in that wind, on that mild a night, had there been a few less tall trees on our route. Tall trees and power lines... )
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 08:01 pm (UTC)I agree too about the myths & cl/archetypes - makes a lot of sense to me. And now I come to think of it, Eva Ibbotson's books (leaving aside the fantasy ones, as that's a different category already) manage to get this right too, don't they? (Reeling off on a tangent now - did you see her A Song for Summer has been republished as children's?)