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This novel is wall-to-wall wish fulfillment – but the wishes fulfilled aren’t mine.
My fantasies tend to center around righting wrongs, being bad-ass, going to boot camp or magic academy or ninja school or some such and thereby acquiring said bad-ass (or magical or psychic powers, or other skills), growing into talents and wisdom and purpose, traveling and adventuring, having your hard work pay off, and finding friends and a cool romantic partner who appreciate and love you, flaws and all. Animal companions are also good.
The fantasies in this book are about being pretty, being magically special in ways that fit creepy social ideals of how teenage girls ought to be, being loved by everyone who isn’t ugly and evil, and having money, specialness, and magic powers handed to you without having to do anything to get them. Do you sense a mismatch?
Fifteen-year-old Laurel has perfect, pale, near-translucent skin that never gets pimples; she’s never hungry, barely eats, and subsists on fruits, vegetables, and Sprite; she’s never gotten a cut or scrape and never menstruated; she’s incredibly beautiful and canonically looks more like a teenager on TV than a real teenager. So, to review: white, slim, gorgeous, doesn’t eat, and doesn’t bleed: the perfect image of femininity!
Homeschooled her whole life, she’s nervous about starting public school, but luckily a cute guy immediately takes a liking to her and gets his friends to befriend her, and no one ever bullies her. Then a beautiful and perfumed flower that resembles wings sprouts from her back! Her flower wings can’t be used to fly. (She could use them to get pollinated and reproduce, though she doesn’t.) What does she use them for? To be pretty and admired!
It turns out that she’s a fairy – and that fairies are plants. In other words, the modern American ideal of the teenage girl is a vegetable. Possibly this concept would have worked better as satire.
Actually, the idea of a plant-girl is pretty cool, and the best part of the novel is when she scientifically investigates her own body. The rest of the book is all about everyone loving her and being nice to her and flirting with her and conveniently explaining what’s going on to her – and then she’s briefly in danger and comes up with a clever idea to save the day. Enjoy that bit, folks, because it’s the only time in the whole book when Laurel takes significant action on her own behalf. After that the fairies bail her out, fight for her, and solve all her problems via magic and a diamond as big as the Ritz.
The fairies are beautiful and good. Their enemies, the trolls, are ugly and evil. This is carried over from classic fairytales, but it’s taken further when a fairy explains that beauty is symmetry and fairies are perfectly symmetrical and trolls are asymmetrical, and the fairies have tried to help the trolls a while back but the trolls’ asymmetry and deformations prove that they are a doomed evolutionary dead end and they were ungrateful anyway. So in this book it’s not only implicit but explicit that beauty is goodness and ugliness is evil. I was creeped out by this and started siding with the trolls. Especially when it turns out that the trolls want to invade Fairyland to steal the diamonds which are so common there that they’re worthless. In that case, why not give them the worthless diamonds in return for a ceasefire?
I’m not crazy about the concept of Mary Sue, because it’s often used to mock any competent or “special” female protagonist. But Laurel is undeniably the quintessential Mary Sue: gorgeous, flawless, a blank slate, loved by all for no reason other than that she’s beautiful ( with the exception of Tamani, who loves her because he knew her in Fairyland before she got her memory wiped, but since the Laurel we know never regains those memories, he effectively has transferred his love for another girl to the one we know), possessing many talents without doing anything to earn or hone them, and given every reward without having to do anything other than stand there and be special. It’s indicative that the story of the book could have happened exactly the same way had Laurel been planted after she gets chucked in the river, and spent the rest of the book growing out of a pot.
My fantasies tend to center around righting wrongs, being bad-ass, going to boot camp or magic academy or ninja school or some such and thereby acquiring said bad-ass (or magical or psychic powers, or other skills), growing into talents and wisdom and purpose, traveling and adventuring, having your hard work pay off, and finding friends and a cool romantic partner who appreciate and love you, flaws and all. Animal companions are also good.
The fantasies in this book are about being pretty, being magically special in ways that fit creepy social ideals of how teenage girls ought to be, being loved by everyone who isn’t ugly and evil, and having money, specialness, and magic powers handed to you without having to do anything to get them. Do you sense a mismatch?
Fifteen-year-old Laurel has perfect, pale, near-translucent skin that never gets pimples; she’s never hungry, barely eats, and subsists on fruits, vegetables, and Sprite; she’s never gotten a cut or scrape and never menstruated; she’s incredibly beautiful and canonically looks more like a teenager on TV than a real teenager. So, to review: white, slim, gorgeous, doesn’t eat, and doesn’t bleed: the perfect image of femininity!
Homeschooled her whole life, she’s nervous about starting public school, but luckily a cute guy immediately takes a liking to her and gets his friends to befriend her, and no one ever bullies her. Then a beautiful and perfumed flower that resembles wings sprouts from her back! Her flower wings can’t be used to fly. (She could use them to get pollinated and reproduce, though she doesn’t.) What does she use them for? To be pretty and admired!
It turns out that she’s a fairy – and that fairies are plants. In other words, the modern American ideal of the teenage girl is a vegetable. Possibly this concept would have worked better as satire.
Actually, the idea of a plant-girl is pretty cool, and the best part of the novel is when she scientifically investigates her own body. The rest of the book is all about everyone loving her and being nice to her and flirting with her and conveniently explaining what’s going on to her – and then she’s briefly in danger and comes up with a clever idea to save the day. Enjoy that bit, folks, because it’s the only time in the whole book when Laurel takes significant action on her own behalf. After that the fairies bail her out, fight for her, and solve all her problems via magic and a diamond as big as the Ritz.
The fairies are beautiful and good. Their enemies, the trolls, are ugly and evil. This is carried over from classic fairytales, but it’s taken further when a fairy explains that beauty is symmetry and fairies are perfectly symmetrical and trolls are asymmetrical, and the fairies have tried to help the trolls a while back but the trolls’ asymmetry and deformations prove that they are a doomed evolutionary dead end and they were ungrateful anyway. So in this book it’s not only implicit but explicit that beauty is goodness and ugliness is evil. I was creeped out by this and started siding with the trolls. Especially when it turns out that the trolls want to invade Fairyland to steal the diamonds which are so common there that they’re worthless. In that case, why not give them the worthless diamonds in return for a ceasefire?
I’m not crazy about the concept of Mary Sue, because it’s often used to mock any competent or “special” female protagonist. But Laurel is undeniably the quintessential Mary Sue: gorgeous, flawless, a blank slate, loved by all for no reason other than that she’s beautiful ( with the exception of Tamani, who loves her because he knew her in Fairyland before she got her memory wiped, but since the Laurel we know never regains those memories, he effectively has transferred his love for another girl to the one we know), possessing many talents without doing anything to earn or hone them, and given every reward without having to do anything other than stand there and be special. It’s indicative that the story of the book could have happened exactly the same way had Laurel been planted after she gets chucked in the river, and spent the rest of the book growing out of a pot.
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How disappointing! I love the idea of a girl = plant. But I want her plantness to do something cool.
Well, you've happily saved me from buying this on audio. I'd seen it and was tempted. Rachel saves the day!
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Thank you for saving me from this book!
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DOOOOO IIIIIT!!
Please! please please please!
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*snorts with laughter*
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Actually, the idea of a plant-girl is pretty cool, and the best part of the novel is when she scientifically investigates her own body
Do you know A.S. Byatt's "A Stone Woman"? Seems to be the antithesis of the vegetable-teenager story in every way, but that idea of self-examination reminded me of it.
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I'm usually more sympathetic to books that are pure id candy than I would otherwise be, because even if they're not my wish-fulfillment, I can respect wish-fulfillment as a concept. (And I share your hesitance about the term 'Mary Sue.') But not when the wishes that get fulfilled are so awful.
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♥ ♥
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Ahahahaha!
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Clearly they don't know me as well as they thought. Thanks for saving me. *shudder*
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Plant fairies, hmm. I used to have a player-character in an RPG who had green skin containing chlorophyll so that she could photosynthesize if food was short . . . it was nerdy-cool. THAT is my kind of plant-person. Wyenla (the green sprout woman) also fought like a ninja. I do not see the point of decorative wings that don't allow you to FLY. Talk about gettin' in the way.
ANYway . . . you'd like my book _Dulcinea_ if you like stories about ~righting wrongs, growing into talents and wisdom and purpose, traveling and adventuring, having your hard work pay off, and finding friends and a cool romantic partner who appreciate and love you, flaws and all.~ Oddly enough, the major complaints about my body of work (coming from various critique partners and a few agents) are that my characters have to work too hard to achieve, and that they don't "WIN BIG" every time. In my Marfa Lights mystery, everyone seems to want my heroine to inherit the big money, but I've tried to make it clear how poisonous that would be to her, as she'd have to take it away from the bequeather's family and would have to fight for it, and (as she says) "you're never happy with the material things you thought were so important because of what it does to the people you fight." BUT ANYWAY, I know I'm way out of step with the culture. *trip*
Our society admires pretty little veggies who don't have a thought in their heads that the tee-vee didn't put there. Thinkers are notoriously unpopular. Alas!
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Laurel=Fairy.. Also been done. Have you read Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones? One of my favorites of hers. Laurel is the soulless and seriously scary Titania.
Also, what
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Not the same genre at all, but a much better book: "Princess Academy" by Shannon Hale.