On my way to get my allergy shots I take two trains and pass from 3 to 5 little free libraries, which I often raid. The other day I picked up a children’s fantasy novel that is what they call “middle grade” level, so one short step up from “chapter book”.
My thoughts went something like this: “Oh, a book about a boggart, might be kind of dumb but I’ll read it over breakfast and put it back out on my free library.” I like myths and legends and folktales and fantasy but there is a particular strain of very twee UK, how can I put this, just kind of a smug rolling around in fairies and gnomes that mildly annoys me because it has no depth even though it lays some claim to being rooted in some real tradition.
So I read it over breakfast the next day and was incredibly irritated but finished it since it was super short. It was formulaic like a Nancy Drew book level of obviousness, which is fine, I can enjoy that and even read like 20 Nancy Drew level formula books in a row, to anesthetize myself but with the potential for analysis of the formula, the time it was written, and so on.
There was an ahistorical boggart, a loch ness mmonster who was also secretly a boggart shape shifter but swimming in the ocean, a scooby doo episode type of plot, and, mega annoyingly, a brash, horrible real estate, hotel, and golf course developer named Mr. Trout. Well THAT was not what I wanted to think about over my toast and marmalade. But fine. Ugh.
I will skip everything else (like that no one had any personality and the kids were less appealing than any old drivel from Enid Blyton) to get to the worst bit, which was right at the start where the two Canadian children visiting their old uncle in Scotland are being dropped off by their dad, who then leaves for an academic conference. I think one child, or a relative or neighbor, wished the mom were also visitng or asked after her, to which boy child responded something like “Working moms, amirite?” (Not literally but the words “working moms” and the implications were there! )
For fuck’s sake! Did I just died and go back to 1982? I have not heard anyone say that for years and years and I hope I never read or hear it again.
Later on someone says how the off screen working mom actually has a quite important good job doing some sort of ecological lawyering in Toronto. That did NOT make up for the implications of someone dissing the “Working Mother”.
As I put the book out on my little free library I noticed it was written by Susan Cooper. Here is where I shit on your entire childhood by rolling my eyes so hard at the author of The Dark is Rising series, which everyone but me loves loves loves (argh), that I can see my own hippocampus.
Women authors, amirite?
SAY MORE about why you don’t, etc.
I’m going to have to go read at least the first book again to remember why I didn’t like it! There was some gender thing that got up my nose really badly when I was a kid and first read it.
Ditto with Wrinkle in Time (which i DO remember decently) and those Lloyd Alexander books (barf).
Likely part of it was my snobbishness at the things adults would recommend to me and expect me to be ecstatic about because they had a teenage girl in them who I would never in 1 million years either identify with, want to identify with, or think was “feminist” in any way, hahah!