cahn | Books I read in August

Entry tags:

Books I read in August

...I reread Madeleine L'Engle, and that was pretty much it :P (Well, also have been reading for German book club, but that discussion is in the Frederick the Great threads. After a month of Duolingo, I can read German on the level of a six-year-old! :D But not very well at all on the level of a twelve-year-old writing on the level of an eight-year-old, and definitely not on the level of a precocious ten-year-old :PP)

-Meet the Austins - actually this was in July, as I was rereading it as a potential birthday present for a kid who doesn't read fantasy (not the niece for whom I was asking for recs before). The Austins are just such a nice family! I used to read about them and think, "I wish my family was like that!" Now I read it and think, "I wish I could parent like that!" I mean, it's clearly aged, some parts better than others, but it's still charming.

-A Small Rain - Book 1 of Katherine Forrester (later Vigneras). L'Engle's first book. It's one of those books that sort of ambles along and shows Katherine growing up, but besides this doesn't have a huge amount of plot. I like it. There is some sexual harassment and a death I totally did not remember from when I read it as a kid. Justin Vigneras, her piano teacher whom she has a crush on (and who, in book 2, we find out she later married) does not come off super well in this book, and I think he was retconned a bit in Wasp.

-A Severed Wasp - Book 2 of Katherine Forrester Vigneras. You can tell this was written much later in L'Engle's career -- this is a much more focused book, with an actual plot, lots of interesting characters, some really interesting things to say about career and family relationships, etc. And it's very cool to see Suzy (previously Austin) and Dave Davidson again and see their kids, and now I'm wondering if I should ask for fic about the two of them for Yuletide; how did that happen, anyway? I also really admire how Katherine feels like a very different character from the Katherine of Rain, and yet from the flashbacks (where she is a much more similar character to that of Rain) we get an idea how she became the Katherine of the present day. I also really like the descriptions of Katherine and her music, and Katherine and her family, and how you build a life with these things. I really enjoyed so much of this book -- up until the ending. The last time I read this was many years ago, so while I remembered who the antagonist was (and had a good time picking up all the little hints I'd missed the first time through -- she really does do a good job of setting it up), I didn't remember very much at all about how it played out.

And then it turns out that Yolande, the bishop's wife, was demanding the girls Emily and Tory kiss her?? And not in a good way. And then tells them not to tell their parents OR ELSE. (And sends a guy to frighten Emily who ends up running over her leg, which has to be amputated *facepalm*) [ETA 9-3: All of this happens before the start of the book, and a major plotline is Katherine putting together the clues to figure out what happened.] Okay. But THEN Katherine is like, "you know, Yolande, you need to stay FAR away from Emily and Tory [okay, good], and now we should just keep all this a secret so it doesn't hurt your husband."

It's sort of a theme of the book that you don't have to tell everyone every single little thing, and it does come up with some decent arguments in that regard -- but this is not one of them, omg. Do you not think JUST MAYBE Suzy and Dave should know about this, Emily and Tory being their kids?? And maybe this has something to do with Tory acting out???? And maybe people WITH KIDS ought to know about this so Yolande doesn't end up teaching THEIR kids in a Sunday School class somewhere????? gaaaaar I am choosing to believe that right after this book ends, Emily and Katherine totally tell her parents everything, just for starters.

I still liked this book a lot, it does a number of really interesting things before the ending, and to be fair it came out before all the clergy scandals and coverups we've all lived through now, but wooooooow, if I were to recommend this to any other people I'd have to super warn them about that ending. (ETA: Also

rymenhild reminded me I didn't mention the romantic!Nazi WTF at all! Yeah, there is also romantic!Nazi WTF that I did remember and mostly skimmed/skipped on this reading.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And sends a guy to frighten Emily who ends up running over her leg, which has to be amputated

What.

I've read a lot of L'Engle but not this one. Am I understanding correctly that Yolande was doing inappropriate sexual stuff with children, sent another adult to threaten one of them who ended up injuring her so that she had HER LEG AMPUTATED, and as a result Katherine decided to cover up the entire thing?!

Am I understanding correctly that Yolande was doing inappropriate sexual stuff with children, sent another adult to threaten one of them who ended up injuring her so that she had HER LEG AMPUTATED, and as a result Katherine decided to cover up the entire thing?!

YES

Well, the only thing is that I didn't make the chronology very clear (I'm going to edit the post to make this a little clearer) -- all of this except for your last clause happened before the book started, and a big plotline of the entire book is Katherine putting together the clues to figure out what happened. But when she does figure it out and confront Yolande at the end of the book, she is all hey, let's cover up the entire thing. Which apparently when I read this as a teenager in the 90's I wasn't particularly bothered by?? (Which says something about the 90's, if you ask me.) But now, as an adult, I'm like WHAT????

I guess I should also append that the guy who injured Emily apparently didn't actually mean to hurt her, but, like. And also that Katherine doesn't tell Emily not to tell anyone (which I think even teenage!me would have objected to), but she's not going to tell anyone herself and encourages Yolande not to confess, which is Quite Bad Enough.

Edited 2020-09-03 15:46 (UTC)

Severed Wasp is so messy. I loved that book when I was a certain kind of dramatic late teen. But I don't think Justin comes off well there either, honestly. They were passionately in love for about a week and then he made her his muse and required her to have sex with other men to get pregnant and cover up his torture-induced impotence. And one of those other men ... uh, as Sarah Rees Brennan once said about Heathcliff, if he was the commandant of the Nazi camp where you were imprisoned, you never date again. Katherine seems, incomprehensibly, to have loved the Nazi and been happy in her affair with whoever the third guy was. Nevertheless, she has had no solid positive relationships that weren't red flag problematic in her entire life, as far as I can tell. In a way that I don't think L'Engle intended, it's a book about carrying trauma and abuse on from generation to generation. I think she thought it was about salvation from sin, but I... don't think it works.

OH! YEAH! How did I forget to mention the Nazi WTF?! (LIKE. WHAT.) Probably because that part I did remember from my last reading, and was uncomfortable enough that I kind of skimmed a lot of the pages dealing with those bits. Right, will amend my post to be like "Also if you read this book, content warning for Nazi WTF!" *facepalm*

I hear you about Justin -- I guess in Wasp I feel like it makes a little more sense that he might have torture-induced trauma that came out in terrible ways? THERAPY FOR EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK. But in Rain he just came off as a creep hitting on Katherine, which was a different flavor of awfulness, at least...

In a way that I don't think L'Engle intended, it's a book about carrying trauma and abuse on from generation to generation.

Yes! I absolutely think you're right. Relatedly, one of the things I didn't mention in the post is her negative relationship with her own daughter, which Katherine herself seems puzzled about but after I finished the book I was like, "yeah, I bet your daughter would have something to say about this."

And -- I do think that L'Engle is a perceptive enough writer (and I get the sense Katherine is a semi-autobiographical character) that we get some interesting observations about this, although the part where it's clearly not the authorial intent is kind of disturbing.

I think she thought it was about salvation from sin, but I... don't think it works.

*nods* Agreed to both.

Katherine's childhood is 100% L'Engle's actual life. The parental glamor and neglect, the boarding school in Switzerland, probably a lot of the rest of the details are real.

I was just reading other articles about L'Engle because you reminded me about her. One of them mentioned A House Like A Lotus, which is also notable for having a rapey lesbian as a central character. There is an interesting pattern there. Add to it the weird ambivalent stuff about homosexuality all the way through both Katherine books. Isn't she the one who gets caught with a friend at boarding school and gets in trouble because the staff thinks they were making out? And there's one tragic gay bar scene in Small Rain as well. And Felix, who is very gay and fails at hetero marriage and finds safety as a celibate priest and has dangerously close affectionate relationships with younger male protégés like the Bishop. Oh, yeah, and there's a straight sexual-harassing priest somewhere in there too. In conclusion, when L'Engle writes about sexuality and sex, it's generally creepy and upsetting.

Why do I remember these books so well???

Ohhhh. Heh, I was insulated from that a bit by the fact that I reread all of these in little bits and pieces, so there'd be an ambivalent homosexuality moment and I'd be like "hmm, that's a bit weird" but it wouldn't quite rise to the level where it pinged me, and then there'd be another incident a little later on but by that time I'd have forgotten about the previous one. But now that you put them all together like that... yeah. And now that you mention it there's also a bisexual guy who cheats on his wife (in a gay relationship) and is written as a total -- "turd" is the word used in the book. :P

And A House Like a Lotus! Another of those ones I had a really intense relationship with as a kid (though I didn't love it as much as Wasp, I read it a lot more times because my library had it). Which, in the 80's (maybe early 90's? but I think I read this one ~~way too~~ young) I wasn't exactly reading too many books with lesbians in happy relationships, so I really appreciated it for that reason, while the rapey stuff just -- it didn't go over my head, exactly, but as a kid I was like "well, author says it's OK as long as everyone forgives each other in the end, so, I guess it's OK?" But now that you mention it... yeah.

Hmm, it also occurs to me that Polly actually had sex, right afterwards, with her significantly older boyfriend, and that's portrayed more as "welp, made a mistake there" where he's concerned, rather than the major fear and rapey vibes from the incident with Max. Which, now that I'm thinking about this more, does remind me of how Katherine ends up having sex and falling in love with sympathetic!Nazi right after being hurt by the Cardinal coming on to her. Huh. I... wonder if this comes up in other books. Anyway, this is all further support of your conclusion:

In conclusion, when L'Engle writes about sexuality and sex, it's generally creepy and upsetting.

...if I keep on L'Engle rereading, I'm going to be reading everything through this lens of abuse and trauma playing out over generations (and in a large degree through sex), which I also think Lotus is an example of. (Max in Lotus is also from an abusive family, which is a Thing.)

Isn't she the one who gets caught with a friend at boarding school and gets in trouble because the staff thinks they were making out?

Yes. And this one I really wondered if it was taken from real life. (I don't have in-text reasons to believe this; we know she was at a similar boarding school, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be tempting to exorcise by writing about it.) Which, if it were, might explain some of why she has such issues.

Why do I remember these books so well???

Lol, I'm wondering this too about all the details I am managing to dredge up about Lotus! Rain and Wasp I only reread a couple of times as a kid (so I remembered them less well), but Lotus and a bunch of her other books I must have read many many times.

Hmm, it also occurs to me that Polly actually had sex, right afterwards, with her significantly older boyfriend, and that's portrayed more as "welp, made a mistake there" where he's concerned, rather than the major fear and rapey vibes from the incident with Max.

That very point is discussed at some length in this Tor essay.

Ooh, thank you for the link! I haven't read the Severed Wasp reread in the same series; I'm a little afraid to now :P (I probably will eventually.)

But anyway the thing I thought was really interesting from the article was that I didn't remember Calvin's "it's OK to be a lesbian as long as you don't talk about it!!" speech at all until it was brought up in that article. I suppose because when I was reading this growing up... in the South... this was if anything progressive; it wasn't then considered a weird or gross attitude to have (as I would consider it now). I guess go growingup!me for taking and remembering the good things from the book (strong happy lesbian committed relationship) and not the bad things?

I guess go growingup!me for taking and remembering the good things from the book (strong happy lesbian committed relationship) and not the bad things?

Yes, good filter!

Also, go you for this being a good thing at that age. I would have rejected this book out of hand for including the word "sex" up until high school, never mind lesbians (which I didn't even know what they were) and then...I certainly would have been deeply uncomfortable with it even in high school. Between being a super-prude on my own account (for a very long time, I didn't think people should kiss on television or the word "sex" should be used in books to refer to gender, never mind actual sex), and growing up in a very heteronormative and slightly homophobic environment, and just having *no idea* about homosexuality beyond "taboo subject," I did not really become comfortable with it until late in college.

When I started grad school, I'd met a grand total of three people, all male professors I'd had in college, who were out of the closet. Before that, I'd never even *heard* of anyone in real life, i.e. not someone on television, who was gay.

And f/f lagged years behind m/m in terms of what I was comfortable reading even in fanfic, even once I'd gotten over the prudery about reading about sex. (Yay misogyny to go with homophobia.)

To my parents' credit, like a lot of people, they got more tolerant in the 2000s, as the movement for tolerance gained visibility. But when I was in high school, and my mother was pregnant and everyone in the family was tossing around baby names, I proposed Ellen, and my mother vetoed it immediately with, "I know you don't watch television, but there's a celebrity named Ellen and she's homosexual, and so you can't name your kids that anymore."

And since that kind of attitude, plus kids at school using it as a taunt/dirty joke, constituted 100% of my exposure to same-sex relationships before I started reading fanfic in senior year of high school, growingup!me would not have been okay with Lotus. (Which is exactly why we need more openness about homosexuality: growingup!me was quite happy to disagree with my parents on any and every subject on which I had a data point to the contrary. ;) )

Heh. I didn't know the word "lesbian" either -- I think I might have learned it from Lotus?

Hm. So as regarding heterosexual sex (which was the only kind people really talked about), I was both a prude about reading about romance/sex (people kissing in books and talking about their (physical) feeeeeelings about it was all ewwwww) but also extremely curious about what this sex thing actually was, given that no one in real life was talking to me about it. So any book that was willing to go into it in a way that I could deal with (memorably, I learned the mechanics from Judith Krantz' multigenerational romance/glamour novels, but not actually from the romance parts, all of which I skipped; rather, from a bit where an adolescent is explaining the Facts of Life to her friends) was interesting to me, and Polly's having sex with her boyfriend was something that apparently fell in that category?

I didn't know anyone gay and out until... grad school? I remember a high school acquaintance coming out, which might have been when we were all in college, but I didn't know him all that well. So the whole concept of homosexuality I learned (middle-to-high-school-ish-age) from Orson Scott Card's books (Songmaster and the Memory of Earth series both have gay and/or bisexual men as characters) and House Like a Lotus. (There may have been more -- those are the ones I remember right now.) In both cases it was an author that (at the time) I would go anywhere for, and so when they portrayed homosexuality as part of the normal order of things (I mean, yeah, they didn't do it perfectly, but they did it), I was like, "Whoa, this is okay?? Well, OSC and L'Engle say it is, so it must be."

OSC (and to a lesser degree L'Engle) gets SO much flak, and some of it is deserved. (Though I will continue to assert that the majority of it is... OSC being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, and this coming with a Whole Host of Stuff and Baggage that it's much harder to understand if you're not a member. But that's another rant for another day.) But it's also true that they were authors with an enormous audience and kids like me who would eat up anything they wrote, and they did choose to show us these things when the vast majority of other authors I was excited about reading didn't, and in both cases they got backlash from their more conservative readers.

I suppose my parents are more tolerant than they were in the 80's, but they are still on the homophobic side. My niece (age 6) declared recently she wanted to get married to a girl, and my mom was like "no, you shouldn't do that," and told me she didn't think my sister should expose my niece to her husband's family as much -- in particular, husband's family includes one F/F marriage. GAH. Anyway, let's just say that tolerance, much less celebration, of same-sex relationships was not one I was getting outside of fiction, so I'll always be grateful that I got it from those authors.

And absolutely yes, I am sure the daughter had very good reasons for estrangement. I wonder what L'Engle's kids thought about that plotline.

OK, this led me down the google rabbit hole and I found this really interesting article. I haven't read either the original Zarin article or Marcus' book, but I now have the kindle sample and I suspect I'll probably end up reading both :)

But wooooow, even that relatively short article does illuminate some things for me.

Edited (apparently can't code html) 2020-09-04 18:00 (UTC)

I read the Zarin article yesterday while thinking about this post, and I realize it was a reread- I must have found it years ago. Yeah. L'Engle was a strange mother and the children had feelings about it. The case of her son Bion is especially tragic. She wrote him as the precocious magical geniuses Charles Wallace Murry and Rob Austin, but neither one of those boys is ever seen anywhere in the mythos as an adult. Bion became an alcoholic with major health issues who never moved out and tried never to read his mother's work. There was no place in her work for the person he actually was.

And you're right about the parallel between Polly running for hetero sex immediately after the Max thing and Katherine running from the Cardinal to the Nazi. There is decidedly something going on there.

It's all so strange to me, because L'Engle's vision and her faith were touchstones to me growing up. I'm Jewish, but as a child I didn't read many authors who really worked with the numinous, and so I took L'Engle's conceptions of the Divine and the angelic worlds to heart. Now I look at her work and think that it's really hard to integrate being a visionary who idealizes humanity with living a life among humans as a good, loving person.

I, uh, read the Zarin article and Marcus' book this weekend; I'd never heard of either of them before, and a lot of things seem rather more... problematic... after reading those. (I had no idea she had an adopted child, which makes the Maggie plotline of Meet the Austins dramatically WTF.)

She wrote him as the precocious magical geniuses Charles Wallace Murry and Rob Austin, but neither one of those boys is ever seen anywhere in the mythos as an adult.

ohhhh nooooo I just realized that in Wasp Katherine's sweet gifted boy child dies. As a boy full of promise, not as an adult with problems. Like a lot of these things, it doesn't ping anything for me as a one-off, but coupled with Charles Wallace's and Rob Austin's disappearances it's Really Not Good.

Now I look at her work and think that it's really hard to integrate being a visionary who idealizes humanity with living a life among humans as a good, loving person.

Hmm. So one of the things that I am taking from Marcus' book is that she actually did live a life among most humans as a good, loving person -- if you weren't her family. She just apparently really sucked at doing family. In Marcus' book there are all these interviews where the person remembers L'Engle as just a lovely woman and awesome friend, and then the interviewee will mention offhand about L'Engle's own family that, yeah, she didn't do great with that. Though I think your point about idealizing humanity still applies -- I think there's a sense in which that kind of outlook can work really well for friends and acquaintances (where idealizing them can act as a kind of ennobling), and really not well for, say, raising one's own children (where it becomes essential to see them as they really are). (Also MAYBE NOT PUTTING YOUR KIDS IN YOUR BOOKS in weird ways would have helped, L'Engle! Just saying!)

Now, on one hand it's not like L'Engle had much in the way of good parental role models, but on the other hand this is still bizarre to me as I've thought the Austin books had such a lovely family/parenting where I wish I could do it like that -- but I suppose there's the ideal parent one imagines in one's head and the parent one actually is. (Perhaps L'Engle conflated the two?) And I know she did at least one or two young-kid books about the Austin family where everyone was much younger, but I haven't read those -- it occurs to me that in the ones I've read, there's also not really any mention of actual parenting of younger kids, and now that I think about it maybe not all that much actual parenting takes place at all?? IDK, I may not be remembering well (even Meet the Austins which I know I just read, but I read it pretty quickly); I may go reread those and look again. Though I'm going to have trouble reading the bits about Rob now :(

Edited 2020-09-07 02:06 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Books I read in August

no subject

no subject

A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf

Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf