Story on the Brain

            This is a young adult novel about ballet and girls in prison. It’s also about selfishness, kindness, evil friends, and justice. Evil friends are a particular interest of mine due to a terrible friend I had. Friends who are destructive and dangerous, not just co-dependent but actually abusive, need a lot more time in young adult fiction, if only to give girls the vocabulary to deal with this phenomenon. Young adults live in a stew of emotional abuse, but often don’t even know how to call it by name, and of course they’re continually conditioned to be “nice” and put up with all kinds of terrible treatment.              The main story here revolves around Violet and Ori, both ballet dancers. Violet is wealthy and privileged and spoiled. Ori comes from a poor and neglectful family. The girls become friends in the first place because Ori’s father has forgotten to p...

            I was startled by how mean Northanger Abbey was. The humor of the book comes at the expense of the characters, even the ones we like, as though Austen’s usual incisive wit turned against everyone’s weaknesses, instead of just against the greedy and cruel and deserving. Almost everyone is treated the way Mr. Collins is treated in Pride and Prejudice , without any of the justifiable cause. Our heroine is dense and easily deluded, her friends petty and vicious. The kindly lady who takes Catherine to Bath is so stupid that she is almost unbearable to read, making the same vacuous statements over and over, verbatim. These aren’t the clever observations and revelations of Austen’s other works, but strangely this work does remind me quite a lot of exactly what I hated about J.K. Rowling’s post-Harry Potter books. It’s one thing when we can laugh gently with the author at the foibles of the characters, seeing our own flaws...

            The magical castle in Howl’s Moving Castle must be one of my favorite meaningful houses of all of fiction. It’s powered by a captive demon and has a door that opens onto four different locations, depending on which blob of paint on the doorknob is turned downward. The upstairs bedroom looks out into a yard in Wales, while the rest of the castle trundles around the countryside in a sort of fairy tale land called Ingary, whose inhabitants know nothing about our world. Howl himself is an actual wizard, but comes from our world. And Sophie, the main character, barges into the castle one day when she has suddenly been turned ninety years old by a passing witch who feels threatened by Sophie’s accidentally magical hats.             It’s complicated, even more so than anyone in the story knows. And the castle is the heart of it all. The wizard, Howl, keeps the castle...