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While browsing my shelves for reading material to take to Santa Barbara (where I am now), I spotted Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin, which, for reasons of my complex OCD approach to shelving that's too long to explain, was sort of near Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet.
"Ah, yes!" I thought. "Tipping the Velvet. The picaresque adventures of a Victorian lesbian oystergirl turned actress turned rentgirl (etc). Whitstable oysters! Monsieur Dildo! Sure, there were scenes of angst and trauma, but in the context of the hard knocks you take when you're living life full-throttle. Now that was a fun book. I am in the mood to read something similar-- and there's that book that's been sitting on my self for so long, about a 1750s prostitute, the cover calls it "bawdy"-- perfect!"
Slammerkin, in fact, sounded so much like what I was in the mood to read that I picked it up then and there and began. But lo! To my dismay, it was not remotely what I would describe as bawdy. I think of "bawdy" as "sexual in an earthy, humorous sense." Instead...
In less than a hundred pages, the desperately poor heroine's father dies, she is emotionally abused by her mother and stepfather, she is raped at the age of fourteen, she gets pregnant by her rapist, her parents disown her for being a slut, they throw her out and she is immediately beaten and gang raped, she gets a venereal disease from that rape, she becomes a prostitute, and since she's still pregnant, she gets her six-month fetus aborted by a hag with a sharpened stick.
Though the book was quite well-written, it was also incredibly grim. Not in the least what I had expected or was looking for at that moment.
Have you ever had a similar sensation of whiplash due to a massive mismatch between what you thought a book (or movie, etc) was and what you actually got?
"Ah, yes!" I thought. "Tipping the Velvet. The picaresque adventures of a Victorian lesbian oystergirl turned actress turned rentgirl (etc). Whitstable oysters! Monsieur Dildo! Sure, there were scenes of angst and trauma, but in the context of the hard knocks you take when you're living life full-throttle. Now that was a fun book. I am in the mood to read something similar-- and there's that book that's been sitting on my self for so long, about a 1750s prostitute, the cover calls it "bawdy"-- perfect!"
Slammerkin, in fact, sounded so much like what I was in the mood to read that I picked it up then and there and began. But lo! To my dismay, it was not remotely what I would describe as bawdy. I think of "bawdy" as "sexual in an earthy, humorous sense." Instead...
In less than a hundred pages, the desperately poor heroine's father dies, she is emotionally abused by her mother and stepfather, she is raped at the age of fourteen, she gets pregnant by her rapist, her parents disown her for being a slut, they throw her out and she is immediately beaten and gang raped, she gets a venereal disease from that rape, she becomes a prostitute, and since she's still pregnant, she gets her six-month fetus aborted by a hag with a sharpened stick.
Though the book was quite well-written, it was also incredibly grim. Not in the least what I had expected or was looking for at that moment.
Have you ever had a similar sensation of whiplash due to a massive mismatch between what you thought a book (or movie, etc) was and what you actually got?
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---L.
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