![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lucille is a city built by angels who fought a revolution to destroy the monsters and create a paradise. Angels fight for equality and peace and justice; monsters oppress people and hurt the innocent. Angels are activists and revolutionaries; monsters are abusers and oppressors.
Jam was born in Lucille, a child of angels. The children of Lucille never knew the war, only its fruits. In Lucille, guns are banned, all people are equal, and everyone is accepted. The monuments are of heroes and the victims of monsters. Lucille has no police or prisons, which were the things of monsters; the monsters themselves were sentenced to rehabilitation. There are no monsters in Lucille.
Jam, a Black trans girl who uses sign language, is happy in Lucille with her painter mom Bitter and her best friend Redemption. Until she accidentally sheds blood on a painting her mother is working on, and a frightening creature emerges. Pet is instantly recognizable to the reader, if not to Jam, as an angel - not a human activist, but the mythological kind. And Pet has come to Lucille to hunt a monster...
An ambitious, didactic children's novel with some elements that worked for me and some that really didn't. Pet is a fascinating character, Jam is very likeable, there's some gorgeous descriptive scenes, and Lucille is an intriguing setting. Attempts to imagine actual utopias always interest me, because it's such a difficult thing to pull off if you're trying for something other than a completely fake happyland in which everything is actually secretly terrible. (Lucille is not that.)
The things I did not like about the book are spoilery, other than the minor issue that Jam is said to be sixteen but if that hadn't been stated, I'd have assumed she was about eleven.
Pet is a very didactic book, deliberately so. It's full of explicitly stated political, social, and moral points. So when it's revealed that the monster Pet is hunting is a child abuser, I immediately expected the message to be that people are neither angels nor monsters, the same person can be both abusive and loved by their victim, and thinking in black-and-white terms like "abusers are monsters" is what got Lucille to be wrongly convinced that there couldn't possibly be abusers in their midst.
Nope! The message is actually "Monsters can look like anyone." People really are angels and monsters.
Especially in the context of child abuse, "abusers are monsters" is a terrible message. One of the biggest reasons kids are reluctant to say that someone is abusing them is that most abusers are people the child knows. They are often people the child loves, even if the love is mixed with anger and hate. They are also often people whom the child's family and social circles loves and respects, and the child knows this.
How can you make it even harder for a child to say that their father or uncle or coach is abusing them? Make it so they don't just have to say "This person is abusing me," but "This person, who you all love, is an actual monster." And this is even worse if the child also loves them. Make a kid have to accept that their parent is a monster in order to say that their parent is abusing them, and you get a society where abuse is even harder to talk about than it already is.
The monster Pet has come to catch is sexually abusing Jam's friend Redemption's little brother. I wasn't crazy about this choice. The little brother is a fairly minor character, and doesn't really do anything in the story other than get abused. I think it would have brought the issues into sharper, more personal focus if it had been Redemption himself who was being abused.
The abuser turns out to be Redemption's uncle Hibiscus. Pet says there's no way to make anyone believe the kid unless Hibiscus confesses. Again, weird. What sort of supposedly just society is Lucille if that's true? Wasn't Lucille created to believe and support victims of oppression and abuse? If it's not true, it's strange that everyone in the story accepts that it's true given that they all either grew up in or created Lucille.
Pet unleashes their full angel form and burns Hibiscus's face, literally melting his eyes in their sockets. In agony and terror, the burned and blinded Hibiscus confesses and is taken off to be rehabilitated.
Previously, trustworthy adults in the book explicitly stated that child abuse is a secret no one wants to believe, that children who are being abused or know of abuse shouldn't be silenced, and that the truth must come out. These are presented as true statements that are valid and useful for children reading the book, in the exact same way as other statements which are presented as valid and useful for readers, like that children should have full bodily autonomy and that it's bad for police to have the authority to shoot people.
Because of that, I expected the solution to the abuse to be one which can be extrapolated to our world, rather than to be purely metaphoric or fantasy. Or if it is fantasy or metaphor, I expected it to be metaphoric for what should or could happen in our world.
Instead, the solution to child abuse is to have a literal angel torture the abuser and burn his eyeballs out to make him confess! Because that's an option that's totally available to kids reading the book.
In a community in which police and prison are banned, apparently it's totally fine to torture a confession out of someone if they're a monster and an angel is doing it. The torture and mutilation produces a truthful confession. That's good, right? So why is it wrong for cops to do it? Just because they're doing it to innocents? Wouldn't anyone have confessed if they got their eyeballs melted, even if they were innocent?
I thought this was leading up to the revelation that Lucille is reproducing the wrongs it fought the revolution to stop, but nope! That's the happy ending. I guess torture is fine so long as the good guys do it and you're sure the torture victim is a monster.
What the hell kind of message is that in this extremely message-y book?
The book was so on-the-nose about stuff like "billionaires are inherently evil" and "children should have complete autonomy over their own bodies" that "the revolution was caused by literal angels" and "your family will only believe you were sexually abused if a literal angel tortures your abuser until he confesses" is hugely unsatisfactory.
Also, for a children's book, the eyeball-melting scene is extremely graphic. In fact it's extremely graphic for any book.
This book won a ton of awards, so my opinion is definitely a minority one.
Jam was born in Lucille, a child of angels. The children of Lucille never knew the war, only its fruits. In Lucille, guns are banned, all people are equal, and everyone is accepted. The monuments are of heroes and the victims of monsters. Lucille has no police or prisons, which were the things of monsters; the monsters themselves were sentenced to rehabilitation. There are no monsters in Lucille.
Jam, a Black trans girl who uses sign language, is happy in Lucille with her painter mom Bitter and her best friend Redemption. Until she accidentally sheds blood on a painting her mother is working on, and a frightening creature emerges. Pet is instantly recognizable to the reader, if not to Jam, as an angel - not a human activist, but the mythological kind. And Pet has come to Lucille to hunt a monster...
An ambitious, didactic children's novel with some elements that worked for me and some that really didn't. Pet is a fascinating character, Jam is very likeable, there's some gorgeous descriptive scenes, and Lucille is an intriguing setting. Attempts to imagine actual utopias always interest me, because it's such a difficult thing to pull off if you're trying for something other than a completely fake happyland in which everything is actually secretly terrible. (Lucille is not that.)
The things I did not like about the book are spoilery, other than the minor issue that Jam is said to be sixteen but if that hadn't been stated, I'd have assumed she was about eleven.
Pet is a very didactic book, deliberately so. It's full of explicitly stated political, social, and moral points. So when it's revealed that the monster Pet is hunting is a child abuser, I immediately expected the message to be that people are neither angels nor monsters, the same person can be both abusive and loved by their victim, and thinking in black-and-white terms like "abusers are monsters" is what got Lucille to be wrongly convinced that there couldn't possibly be abusers in their midst.
Nope! The message is actually "Monsters can look like anyone." People really are angels and monsters.
Especially in the context of child abuse, "abusers are monsters" is a terrible message. One of the biggest reasons kids are reluctant to say that someone is abusing them is that most abusers are people the child knows. They are often people the child loves, even if the love is mixed with anger and hate. They are also often people whom the child's family and social circles loves and respects, and the child knows this.
How can you make it even harder for a child to say that their father or uncle or coach is abusing them? Make it so they don't just have to say "This person is abusing me," but "This person, who you all love, is an actual monster." And this is even worse if the child also loves them. Make a kid have to accept that their parent is a monster in order to say that their parent is abusing them, and you get a society where abuse is even harder to talk about than it already is.
The monster Pet has come to catch is sexually abusing Jam's friend Redemption's little brother. I wasn't crazy about this choice. The little brother is a fairly minor character, and doesn't really do anything in the story other than get abused. I think it would have brought the issues into sharper, more personal focus if it had been Redemption himself who was being abused.
The abuser turns out to be Redemption's uncle Hibiscus. Pet says there's no way to make anyone believe the kid unless Hibiscus confesses. Again, weird. What sort of supposedly just society is Lucille if that's true? Wasn't Lucille created to believe and support victims of oppression and abuse? If it's not true, it's strange that everyone in the story accepts that it's true given that they all either grew up in or created Lucille.
Pet unleashes their full angel form and burns Hibiscus's face, literally melting his eyes in their sockets. In agony and terror, the burned and blinded Hibiscus confesses and is taken off to be rehabilitated.
Previously, trustworthy adults in the book explicitly stated that child abuse is a secret no one wants to believe, that children who are being abused or know of abuse shouldn't be silenced, and that the truth must come out. These are presented as true statements that are valid and useful for children reading the book, in the exact same way as other statements which are presented as valid and useful for readers, like that children should have full bodily autonomy and that it's bad for police to have the authority to shoot people.
Because of that, I expected the solution to the abuse to be one which can be extrapolated to our world, rather than to be purely metaphoric or fantasy. Or if it is fantasy or metaphor, I expected it to be metaphoric for what should or could happen in our world.
Instead, the solution to child abuse is to have a literal angel torture the abuser and burn his eyeballs out to make him confess! Because that's an option that's totally available to kids reading the book.
In a community in which police and prison are banned, apparently it's totally fine to torture a confession out of someone if they're a monster and an angel is doing it. The torture and mutilation produces a truthful confession. That's good, right? So why is it wrong for cops to do it? Just because they're doing it to innocents? Wouldn't anyone have confessed if they got their eyeballs melted, even if they were innocent?
I thought this was leading up to the revelation that Lucille is reproducing the wrongs it fought the revolution to stop, but nope! That's the happy ending. I guess torture is fine so long as the good guys do it and you're sure the torture victim is a monster.
What the hell kind of message is that in this extremely message-y book?
The book was so on-the-nose about stuff like "billionaires are inherently evil" and "children should have complete autonomy over their own bodies" that "the revolution was caused by literal angels" and "your family will only believe you were sexually abused if a literal angel tortures your abuser until he confesses" is hugely unsatisfactory.
Also, for a children's book, the eyeball-melting scene is extremely graphic. In fact it's extremely graphic for any book.
This book won a ton of awards, so my opinion is definitely a minority one.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities.
Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. A traumatic assault leads to a crystallization of her alternate selves: Asụghara and Saint Vincent. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these selves--now protective, now hedonistic--move into control, Ada's life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction.
Narrated by the various selves within Ada and based in the author's realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
:puts the book WAAAAAY WAY FROM HERSELF:
From:
no subject
How much did the human angel-activists have to do with it?
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I think I am a lot less interested in even a negotiable utopia when it turns out to have been partially founded and policed by literal Biblical-mythological angels than if humans were trying to give it a go on their own. Also, I don't think it makes torture okay when angels do it. Given theodicy, that actually creeps me out a lot.
From:
no subject
I know we're drenched in media that show people being tortured into confession. BUT THIS DOES NOT MAKE IT GOOD. EVER. (and--and this has nothing to do with morals, just with practicality--torture produces lots of false confessions. It's a **terrible** way to find out the truth of something).
From:
no subject
Anyway, on next week's episode of Tortured by an Angel...
From:
no subject
Yeah, it hit the Uncanny Valley between social commentary and metaphoric fantasy for me as well.
From:
no subject
...I am also curious how the book thinks "monsters" being sentenced to "rehabilitation" is not an instance of prison.
From:
no subject
IIRC Hibiscus had been rehabilitated before, so I guess treated and released back into the community? That worked well.
The ending was so frustrating in part because yes, it did seem very aware that a big problem with creating a planned community around ideals is that it feels like admitting that your community is a failure if it turns out that someone is abusing kids, so everyone just pretends it can't happen and ignores it if it does happen. But then it's resolved with "an angel will torture the abuser into confessing," which did lead to people having to admit that someone abused kids. But I thought it would happen in a more real-world-based manner.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
They definitely feel like prisons by just another name, to the extent that we know anything about them, and it wound up being really creepy that we didn't see any successfully rehabilitated people or even any out in the community still working on amends or anything.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
And so I'm like...hmm. I don't think I would like this book, and it would have been bad for me as a child. But I can sort of see how it's a cathartic fantasy for some people, including children, they know problems can't be fixed that way but still on a deep level want both the fluffy kind pacifist world AND the arc where noone believes you until a LITERAL ANGEL tortures the abuser until they admit it publicly, and are willing to roll with the cognitive dissonance and unfortunate implications to get both of those things at once.
Like I often bounce off stories (which this sounds like an example of) that mix didactic literalism where everything that happens is a lesson with self indulgent power fantasy you shouldn't overthink, but a lot of people seem into that combination and have no problem with it so am not sure how much of it is a me problem.
But I can't see any good reason for a narrative about abuse to not give the actual abuse victim significant focus, agency, and depth.
(*)There's also other issues but this is the relevant one
From:
no subject
The abused kid has a very small role and I recall nothing about him as a character, not even his name.
From:
no subject
I mean you’re not wrong that a lot of people are into it but I don’t think it’s you that has the problem, fwiw. >.>
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I was NOT expecting this review to go into "and then a literal angel tortured someone and that's the happy ending" WTAF
From:
no subject