Reading on Wednesday
8/5/13 13:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyJust finished
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, 1980s mix-tape romance between a middle-class nerdy boy with a Korean mother and white father, Park, and Eleanor, a white girl who has just moved back in with her mother and abusive stepfather after having been kicked out of the house for the whole previous year. The mix of charming sweet romance and abusive family dynamic is occasionally jarring, in a way that I suspect is entirely intentional. It's that kind of deceptively simple and casual writing style that makes me completely unable to put down the book, and both Park's unthinking privilege and Eleanor's skittishness are really believable.
It is a love story about love making you stronger, nobler, braver -- which I like much better than the kind of love story that's about love making you make bad life choices.
(I'm of two minds about some of the stuff about race -- I entirely believe that a girl like Eleanor raised in the white-bread midwest in the 1980s would exoticize her Korean-American boyfriend, but the author doesn't really explicitly problematize that, but it's not the kind of book that has a lot of author-over-your-shoulder-telling-you-how-to-feel.)
Reading now
The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker, which I have had for years and not read because nobody ever mentioned just how much fun it was -- a newly minted Caravan Master running away from his past life and making the acquaintance of a brilliant cook and a couple of demons or part-demons. His life gets complicated. This is the sort of book that can only be described by the word "rollicking." It rollicks quite a lot.
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, 1980s mix-tape romance between a middle-class nerdy boy with a Korean mother and white father, Park, and Eleanor, a white girl who has just moved back in with her mother and abusive stepfather after having been kicked out of the house for the whole previous year. The mix of charming sweet romance and abusive family dynamic is occasionally jarring, in a way that I suspect is entirely intentional. It's that kind of deceptively simple and casual writing style that makes me completely unable to put down the book, and both Park's unthinking privilege and Eleanor's skittishness are really believable.
It is a love story about love making you stronger, nobler, braver -- which I like much better than the kind of love story that's about love making you make bad life choices.
(I'm of two minds about some of the stuff about race -- I entirely believe that a girl like Eleanor raised in the white-bread midwest in the 1980s would exoticize her Korean-American boyfriend, but the author doesn't really explicitly problematize that, but it's not the kind of book that has a lot of author-over-your-shoulder-telling-you-how-to-feel.)
Reading now
The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker, which I have had for years and not read because nobody ever mentioned just how much fun it was -- a newly minted Caravan Master running away from his past life and making the acquaintance of a brilliant cook and a couple of demons or part-demons. His life gets complicated. This is the sort of book that can only be described by the word "rollicking." It rollicks quite a lot.