** spoiler alert ** This is much darker than the previous Tiffany Aching books, all throughout. The themes aren't any darker, but the actual events are, starting with a pregnant 13 year old girl whose father beats her so badly she has a miscarriage and the baby dies. And then the father places bouquets of nettles around the poor dead baby on some straw in the barn and hangs himself. Just to start with. Jeez!
Of course our Tiffany cuts him down and buries the baby and saves the girl and it all comes right in the end, but the events are infinitely darker than previous books, to the point where it's pretty shocking to someone expecting a nice friendly but supernaturally scary Tiffany Aching story.
It lightened up by the second half.
It's kind of hard to articulate why this was an issue for me. Obviously the subject matter is fairly common in YA fiction. But it didn't really seem so natural to this series. Mostly the difference was in tone. Normally in these books, the tone is a very funny dry wit no matter what's going on, but the first half of this book was almost humorless. Additionally, it was full of explanations, also unusual.
Not my favorite Tiffany Aching book, unfortunately. Though I really did love the last half.
Of course our Tiffany cuts him down and buries the baby and saves the girl and it all comes right in the end, but the events are infinitely darker than previous books, to the point where it's pretty shocking to someone expecting a nice friendly but supernaturally scary Tiffany Aching story.
It lightened up by the second half.
It's kind of hard to articulate why this was an issue for me. Obviously the subject matter is fairly common in YA fiction. But it didn't really seem so natural to this series. Mostly the difference was in tone. Normally in these books, the tone is a very funny dry wit no matter what's going on, but the first half of this book was almost humorless. Additionally, it was full of explanations, also unusual.
Not my favorite Tiffany Aching book, unfortunately. Though I really did love the last half.
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