Out by the oak leaf with never a bough

[redrikki]

The thing about childhood nostalgia is realizing that sometimes the things you have fond memories of are actually crap. I mostly find this to be true with films and cartoons, but the books I remember loving actually hold up pretty well. I wonder why that is?

What I just finished

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope - Upon re-reading, it's pretty obvious why I loved this as a kid. Our hero, Kate Sutton, fails at performing conventional femininity. She's smart, stubborn, and 100% done with everyone's nonsense.. In short, she's precisely the sort of woman a young me would aspire to be, even before she saves the day and wins the guy. Christopher Heron is a bit too much of a Byronic asshole for my tastes, but the two of them have some great banter where she calls him on his shit and he's just like why are you like this and why is it so hot? It's a book that definitely holds up and was well worth the 25 cents I spent buying it.

I was struck by the difference in language and writing style between this book, first published in the 1970s, and more modern YA novels. The descriptions feel so much more dense and evocative. I think the last YA book that felt like that was by Rosemary Suttcliff, and she's not exactly current. When did stripping out vibrant descriptions and dumbing down the language in YA literature become a thing? Who started that trend and can we reverse it somehow? 

What I'm reading next

::Shrug:: I have a pretty serious backlog of books I've picked up at library book sales over the years. I think Love in the Time of Butterflies was on the shelf next to this on, so that maybe?

Comments

[skygiants]

This is one of my favorite childhood books -- Kate in all her stubbornness is just such a rich character, and her arguments with Christopher about the practicality of their imaginary houses is such a good and specific way to fall in love.

[redrikki]

She's just so relentlessly practical and I love her. Of course Christopher fell for her too. Boy may have a death wish, but he's not completely stupid.

[ljwrites]

I remember reading that the paring down of prose is a reaction to people's shorter attention spans from visual media. On the one hand I have the attention span of a gerbil myself so I benefit from that, but I miss those long, dense descriptions too.

[redrikki]

I miss descriptions within reason. I read The Red Tent a few years back and was just overwhelmed by the sheer wordiness of it. Like, yeah, I could practicality taste the honey warmth of the sunlight as it poured across the floor of the tent, but it took so damn long for an actual plot to happen I was bored halfway through. I think both Pope and Sutcliff did an excellent job of mixing rich, evocative language with actually moving the story. Their descriptions served the plot instead of just being flowery and extraneous world building. We need to get back to that.