rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2009-01-28 01:10 pm
rachelmanija) wrote2009-01-28 01:10 pm
Breathe My Name, by R. A. Nelson
This is not from the POC Challenge. The author and all the main characters are white. I note that of the last three books I read, the two POC Challenge books were awesome, and the random white guy book was awful. The universe is encouraging me to continue the challenge!
I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated this YA novel, which has won a number of awards which it totally did not deserve. Hate. Hate. Hate. Let me tell you why!
It opens with a creepily evocative piece of writing from the point of view of a child, Shine, living with her three younger sisters and their psychotic mother, who thinks she's the queen of a fantasyland called Fireless.
Then it switches to the same child, now a teenager named Frances, who is living with her adoptive parents in Alabama. Her birth mother and sisters are nowhere around. Anyone who follows the news can instantly figure out what happened, though Nelson doesn't reveal it until about a third of the way into the book. Frances seems reasonably well-adjusted, though with some residual PTSD.
She falls for the new boy at school, Nix, who is from New Orleans and is Quirky with a capital Q. He has an autistic brother and is great with the school's developmentally disabled student and takes her to a furniture store for a date and is just fine that everyone thinks he's weird because of all the great things he does for his autistic brother and is generally a saint. I hated him. Especially when he kept dropping "Mammy Ida," his Creole nanny, into the conversation. (Or is "mammy" totally not racially offensive in New Orleans and Alabama?)
Frances gets a message via a lawyer from her birth mother, now in a halfway house for murderers found not guilty by reason of insanity, to come see her. So she and Nix go on a road trip into her past.
Why I hated this book:
1. I have a problem with the use of autistic people as devices to show how wonderful neurotypical people are for being nice to them. If the autistic brother was a real character, that would be different, but he isn't. He's just there to show how awesome Nix is.
Frances has a climactic realization that all people are damaged and broken, from the brother to her mother to her and Nix. That does not work at all. If her PTSD was severe enough to EVER make anyone think she's scary or different or Other in any way, that could have worked... but it isn't.
2. Nix really rubbed me the wrong way. I think Nelson tried too hard to make me love him.
3. The climax was possibly the stupidest thing I've read all year. If the book had been a thriller, it... still would have been stupid. But at least it would have been less jarring. A mainstream novel should not climax with the discovery that...
...the letter from her Mom was faked by the "lawyer," whose daughter died, in an unrelated incident, the same day that Frances' sisters did. Furious that a woman killed her own daughters when he would have saved his if he could, the "lawyer" became obsessed with the idea that Frances should enact justice on her mother. He got a job at the halfway house and waited nine years to write the fake letter luring Frances to the halfway house in the hope that she would murder her mother. When she doesn't, he tries to strangle Frances. Her psychotic mother smashes his head in and kills him. Frances goes off with Nix and burns down her abandoned childhood home.
The end!
I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated this YA novel, which has won a number of awards which it totally did not deserve. Hate. Hate. Hate. Let me tell you why!
It opens with a creepily evocative piece of writing from the point of view of a child, Shine, living with her three younger sisters and their psychotic mother, who thinks she's the queen of a fantasyland called Fireless.
Then it switches to the same child, now a teenager named Frances, who is living with her adoptive parents in Alabama. Her birth mother and sisters are nowhere around. Anyone who follows the news can instantly figure out what happened, though Nelson doesn't reveal it until about a third of the way into the book. Frances seems reasonably well-adjusted, though with some residual PTSD.
She falls for the new boy at school, Nix, who is from New Orleans and is Quirky with a capital Q. He has an autistic brother and is great with the school's developmentally disabled student and takes her to a furniture store for a date and is just fine that everyone thinks he's weird because of all the great things he does for his autistic brother and is generally a saint. I hated him. Especially when he kept dropping "Mammy Ida," his Creole nanny, into the conversation. (Or is "mammy" totally not racially offensive in New Orleans and Alabama?)
Frances gets a message via a lawyer from her birth mother, now in a halfway house for murderers found not guilty by reason of insanity, to come see her. So she and Nix go on a road trip into her past.
Why I hated this book:
1. I have a problem with the use of autistic people as devices to show how wonderful neurotypical people are for being nice to them. If the autistic brother was a real character, that would be different, but he isn't. He's just there to show how awesome Nix is.
Frances has a climactic realization that all people are damaged and broken, from the brother to her mother to her and Nix. That does not work at all. If her PTSD was severe enough to EVER make anyone think she's scary or different or Other in any way, that could have worked... but it isn't.
2. Nix really rubbed me the wrong way. I think Nelson tried too hard to make me love him.
3. The climax was possibly the stupidest thing I've read all year. If the book had been a thriller, it... still would have been stupid. But at least it would have been less jarring. A mainstream novel should not climax with the discovery that...
...the letter from her Mom was faked by the "lawyer," whose daughter died, in an unrelated incident, the same day that Frances' sisters did. Furious that a woman killed her own daughters when he would have saved his if he could, the "lawyer" became obsessed with the idea that Frances should enact justice on her mother. He got a job at the halfway house and waited nine years to write the fake letter luring Frances to the halfway house in the hope that she would murder her mother. When she doesn't, he tries to strangle Frances. Her psychotic mother smashes his head in and kills him. Frances goes off with Nix and burns down her abandoned childhood home.
The end!
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WTF kind of ending is that?!
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at birthwith some other book, because, y'know, WHAT?is "mammy" totally not racially offensive in New Orleans and Alabama?
Uhm. It's not a moniker I ever heard in either, and I was spending time around families (where you'd hear such). I mean, yes, there are familial titles and it's de riguer to use them -- Cousin Bob, Uncle Joe, Mamaw, that kind of thing. The author may have been confusing "mammy" (from Gone with the Wind) with the more common "mamaw", which I have heard all over the place, though mostly Alabama and Mississippi.
Still, anyone with half a brain and more than ten minutes' exposure to pop culture is going to make a negative connection, there.
Second, if Mammy/Mamaw is not a blood-relation, the continued use of title tracks as either strong formality (does the character say "yes'm" and "no'm" a lot?) or as childishness. At a certain age, nearly all of us try to express our adulthood by putting ourselves on a first-name basis -- similar happens when we graduate from a child's "Mama" to "Mom". The titular use says something about the character, but I can't tell you what from here, other than the pop-culture connotations make me queasy.
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//reads spoiler-cut text
....WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.
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But nope, just a terrible ending. What a letdown.
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Yeah, Meemaw, I've heard that one, now that you mention it. Where do these short-versions come from? Heh.
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Also, the ending is stupid.
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Uh. I think it's a safe bet that he's nuts.
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... huh.
Was any of that ending even hinted at previously in the book?
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But some things, only Kaori Yuki can pull off.
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On topic: I second at least the WHAAAAAA?
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WHAAAAAAAAAAA, indeed. MAMMY.
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... were a pile of bad slasher novels dropped on his head when he was a child, or something?
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