wednesday books goes nowhere

[landofnowhere]

A DWJ-rereading week!

Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones. Yes, Sophie in the hat shop is super relatable right now, and in general I find Sophie extremely relatable. This time around, I was reading it thinking of what a friend had said at book club, which is that everyone in the book is constantly being grouchy/cranky at each other. Which is true, and yet the book is still a comfort read for me -- I think part of it is that when I need a comfort read, I'm often grouchy :-D And also that I find "everyone's grouchy and blaming each other in the moment, but deep down they all love each other" comforting, partly because that's the sort of family I come from.

Another insight I had from that book club was that Howl's Moving Castle/Sense and Sensibility/Frozen all have something in common: they are stories that start with the death of a father of girls, and the protagonist is the emotionally repressed oldest sister who gets more in touch with her emotions over the story. And although they are stories about sadness/grieving, they never really get into how the protagonist feels about her father's death. So I was partly thinking of reading that storty against the other two, and there are certainly illuminating similarities and differences.

Fire and Hemlock, Diana Wynne Jones. I finished Howl's Moving Castle on Halloween, and then realize that this was the DWJ that was really appropriate for that day. So I immediately started this. I think I read this about once a year, sometimes more, between the ages of 14 and 24, and then stopped reading it because I'd gotten to the point where I basically had the book memorized. Well, now I'm 34 (which is to say, about the same age as Tom, wow...), and it's been a long enough break. It's still a very good book, though I'm not unreservedly in love with it as I was as a teenager.

I think the main new thing I noticed this time was when they meet and start pretending together, Tom's suggestion that "couldn't you be the one to save my life" and giving her the picture "instead of a medal for life-saving". He really is grooming her.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Well, now I'm 34 (which is to say, about the same age as Tom, wow...)

It's always wild to re-read old favorites and realize you're the same age as one of the characters. (I've re-read a surprising number of books this year in which characters turned out to be my current age, 23.)

I read Fire and Hemlock for the first time over the summer, and I think I would have liked it more if I'd read it when I was younger, because HOO BOY it was red flag city over here with Tom and Polly.

[landofnowhere]

Yes! Especially since I started reading it and comparing my age to Polly's. I loved the book when I read it at 14 because I felt it *got right* the experience of being an imaginative, bookish (and somewhat lonely) young girl who wants to be a hero. But I'm farther off from that now.

[sorcyress]

I like your observation about grouchiness covering a core of "love and care about each other _but_..."

As an oldest sister¹, I've always had a lot of love for Sophie. Especially because I've always really loved folktales and fairy tales and read heaps of them, so her genre savvyness was one of the first really good instances of it I ever got to read!

1: Gender is weird. Alys still calls me sister (or seester), and that is exactly the right word because we have this tight bond like that. I don't know if Shannon uses sister or sibling to refer to me, I'd give her either.

[landofnowhere]

Likewise as an older sister! (and yeah, I can see how that would be complicated).

Also I read Sophie as neurodivergent in some way, though I'm not sure how much that's in the text -- the "I'm a failure!" thing is partly genre-savviness, but that and Howl's response "you're not a failure, you just don't stop to *think*!" makes me think of girls who've grown up with undiagnosed ADHD.

[oracne]

Your Howl's Moving Castle/Sense and Sensibility/Frozen insight is very cool!

[landofnowhere]

Thanks! I'd love to know more stories in that niche.

[lokifan]

Well, now I'm 34 (which is to say, about the same age as Tom, wow...)

Eeeeeek. I love that book but I suspect reading it again from that perspective would be disquieting. I read it first and often as a kid, which I think stopped the romance from ever landing with me - if I'd read it as a teenager first I would've loved it, but I connected with kid-Polly and her relationship with Tom.

I suspect reading it now, in my thirties, I'd be kinda OUCH. Sort of like when I watched Pretty Little Liars, which is a show for teenagers that includes a 22-year-old teacher having a ~forbidden romance with a student, AS a 22-year-old teacher with teenage students, and just going OH NO.

Totally agreed re: grumpy can still be so comforting. Dark Lord of Derkholm is a massive comfort read for me, and that's mostly grumpy stressed people all the way through.

[landofnowhere]

Yeah, I loved the romance as a teenager, but not so much now. And I should have said "older than Tom", really: by my math he's about 14 years older than Polly, who is 10-19 over the course of the book. This time around I was surprised that my younger self had taken the heroic driving so much in stride -- it's described humorously, and I think needs to be there to set up the scene in Bristol -- but really it's super alarming (even if Tom knew he was under magical protection, what about anyone else he might cause an accident to!).

I think grumpy narrative voice can be a difficult balance to get right, and won't land with everyone. My own tolerance for it has probably gone down as I've gotten older: I could have use a bit less grumpiness in the teenage narrator of A Deadly Education in the first half, and just wanted her to grow up already. Connie Willis and Robin McKinley are both authors who do grumpy narrative voice, sometimes better than others.