A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

"Perdita Smith" is discovered at the bottom of a well with assorted fractures and total amnesia. After what in retrospect was the world's most perfunctory search turns up no clues to her identity, she is taken in by friendly nuns.

When driving with a nun, Perdita sees someone riding and remarks that she rides well, and so realizes that she knows something about horses. In the hope of getting a clue about her identity and also because she needs a job, she obtains a position at a local stable with a bad reputation (all the good ones were highly suspicious of her lack of credentials).

There she meets the manipulative owner, the owner's sullen teenage son, the owner's sweet young daughter who's terrified of riding, the sexy asshole who's the son of the dead previous owner, the golden-boy rider who's some relation I forget, the drunk stablehand, and a kitten who sneaks in at night to cuddle with Perdita and sneaks out before she can get a good look at her. The kitten was my favorite character and I was very aggravated that Holland forgot it existed at some point and we never get a good look at it.

If you have read any books by Holland involving a romance, you know that whichever hot dude initially appears to be the biggest asshole is going to be the love interest. (He may actually be an asshole, but he won't have actually murdered his wife.) Sexy asshole it is! Perdita whipsaws so much on whether she thinks he's evil or not that at one point she says "Though I hated him with every fiber of my being..." and I had to flip back to confirm that Holland had indeed lost track and the previous scene had Perdita deciding that he was clearly a good guy who was being blackmailed.

The amnesia and riding parts of the story are lots of fun, especially the subplot involving the girl who's scared of riding. (The kid does, in fact, have zero interest in riding as a sport, but Perdita gets her onboard by getting her to bond with her horse as a friend.) The suspense bits were distinctly pasted on yay.

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Completely forgot to review this when I finished it, can now barely remember it. Moderately entertaining but uninspired Gothic in which the heroine spends 90% of the book sorting papers in a spooky attic and searching for her perennially missing dog, with occasional interludes in which someone whomps her over the head, shoots at her, or ties her up.

The concluding explanation of what the hell was going on is less amusingly deranged than one might hope from Holland (author of the deliciously wacky Trelawny, in which twin brothers impersonate each other until she didn't know which was which), but did manage to bring in multiple villains, an exploding car, international intrigue, a completely pasted-on-yay romance, and surprise!secret Israeli agents valiantly uncovering an incomprehensible plot by anti-Semites. Why this was all going on at a lonely British house and involved the heroine and her dog, only Holland knew.

Welcome back to insane cracktastic Gothic land!

In a moment of synchronicity, last Friday I was invited to share some Belgian chocolates labeled individually by province. Unfortunately, the font's capital I looked much like a small l, and so when asked to choose, I said, "I'll take the leper!"

I do not often come across books containing leprosy, though when I read Darcourt I immediately regretted forgetting about the YA novel in which the heroine develops leprosy, watches her mother agonizingly die of rot, is shipped off to a leper colony, and dies, the end -- I would have certainly included it in my YA agony award nominations if I had. I was also reminded of Thomas Covenant. Normally I don't find characters whiny if they have something to whine about. But Covenant managed to be so whiny that I thought, "Oh, get over your leprosy already!"

Young journalist Sally Wainwright impersonates a friend of hers in order to get hired as governess for a wealthy teenager on Darcourt Island. The island is owned by reclusive billionaire Tristram Darcourt. Sally is ostensibly doing this to write an expose on him, but really because her mother was jilted by him and she wants to find out what happened. (She can't ask because both her parents are now dead.)

Teenage Alix is wild and has a Mysterious Skin Condition for which she takes Mysterious Meds. Darcourt is high-handed and arrogant. He is also said to have let his brother die in the super-quick quicksand which is featured in the Mysterious Marsh surrounding the house, into which Sally is forbidden to go. Sally is promply menaced by snakes and scorpions released in her room, plus Mysterious Figures, and people shooting at her, whomping her over the head, and trying to kill her dog.

Could it be the Mysterious Mrs. Darcourt, alternately said to be in the south of France and lurking in Mysterious Marsh?! Or the off-stage Mysterious Middle Eastern Group which is the subject of a code-named Pentagon study? Or Andre, who is a cousin or something? Or some blonde kid with a cowlick?

( LEPER OUTCAST UNCLEAN!!!!! )

Kit wouldn't rest until she exorcised the spirits of her scornful ancestors from the mammoth house which she now possessed. Or so she thought, until the house strangely began to take possession of her. In the mysterious attics which spread like tentacles over the roof, legends of the past came to life. Somewhere there lurked what remained of her lost, unrequited love, and he was coming to claim her kin.

-- Back cover of Trelawny, by Isabelle Holland.

Oh boy oh boy, this is going to be great!

Three YA novels, three not-entirely-satisfying reading experiences.

Rats Saw God, is a first novel by Rob Thomas, who went on to create Veronica Mars. I would like to try some of his later novels, as although this one has flashes of the VM wit and style many of us know and love, he clearly learned a lot since he wrote this one.

There are two stories here. In the present day, Steve is a stoner senior who's flunking out despite his brilliant SAT scores. A sympathetic counselor offers to let him graduate if he turns in a 100 page manuscript on absolutely anything. Steve starts writing about what happened to him in his sophomore year, the year that his famous astronaut father is still married to his mother, the year he falls in love, the year he's in the school Dada club... and the year his life fell apart. This narrative is intercut with the story of how he pulls himself together in his senior year, as writing about the past gives him insight into the present.

There's a lot of intelligence here, and Thomas writes about teenagers really convincingly. It's a quick read, and often funny-- the bits about the Dada club are hilarious, although I think most of their art is actually surrealist social satire, not Dada. The trouble I have with the book is that the parts in the past are much more compelling than the parts in the present, and a lot of crucial emotional breakthroughs and character relationships are told rather than shown. For instance, late in the book Steve has a revelation about his father, himself, and their relationship-- sorry, I have to spoil this to explain, skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to know-- which is that their difficult relationship is because they are more alike than different, although Steve had thought they were opposites. The trouble with this is partly that another character tells this to Steve, and partly that what she says about Steve-- that like his Dad, he's a neat freak and a control freak and so forth-- is not behavior we've seen Steve exhibit. Also, Steve's big trauma is pretty predictable, especially if you saw the VM episode where the same thing happens.

Not at all a bad read, but I bet Thomas' later books are better.

Isabelle Holland was a writer of YA and Gothic novels who seems to have been most popular in the seventies. I imprinted on her YAs as a kid and her Gothics as a teen, and that's a big part of the reason why I snatch them up if I see them used. The Gothics have mostly aged better than YAs, many of which-- like the ones below-- have become sadly dated.

Most of Holland's YA novels are about a girl who is fat, used to be fat, or has parents who think she's fat, and who loves animals. Holland is very good at delineating the emotional states of angsty teenagers, and her adult characters tend to be more three-dimensional than is common in YA novels. This, however, is sometimes a problem when she starts siding with the adults over the teenagers. I'm sorry, but in a YA novel I am probably going to sympathize with the teen narrator no matter what. This is especially problematic in her problem novels, which tend to be more one-note than her general YA novels, and is a major issue in The Search and Hitchhike.

The Search was written in 1991, which probably makes it one of her last novels, and it still feels dated. Seventeen-year-old Claudia goes to her teacher's house; he gets her drunk, has sex with her while she's in a blackout, and gets her pregnant. She gives up the baby for adoption, to an agency that will never ever let her know who has her baby or what happened to him. But afterward, she worries about her baby: what if he didn't go to a good home? What if he's being abused? She embarks on a search.

This is readable, like all Holland's books, but ultimately meh. She is way more sympathetic to the father of the baby, and at Claudia's expense, than I would be. Points for a sympathetic priest and a touching ending, though.

In Hitchhike, teenage Pud is told to never ever ever hitchhike. She hitchhikes. Bad stuff happens. There is an interesting idea here, which is that Pud is first picked up by a man whose daughter ran away, because Pud reminds him of his daughter and he thinks that by getting insight into Pud, he can figure out what happened to his daughter and why she left. If this had been the whole novel, and had been developed at more length, it would have been a better novel. But hitchhikers must pay for their stupid deeds, so Pud flees that guy and promptly gets kidnapped and held for ransom.

It is symptomatic of something that drove me nuts all through the book, which is that Pud is always excoriated at length for everything she does wrong, but not praised for what she does right, that after she escapes she tries to see the bright side by saying, "Hey, it was pretty cool that I sawed through the ropes and broke through a weak place in the shed and escaped, huh?" and is answered by a scolding about how stupid she was to have gotten in the truck in the first place.

The dog that she rescues early on doesn't die, though, and she does get to keep him, so props to Holland for not punishing Pud by killing her dog.

Since this is even more Gothic in some ways than Nine Coaches Waiting-- more unusual-to-the-genre elements but also more coincidences-- I shall italicize the most Gothic elements once more. Antonia Moncrieff, a beautiful editor with a thirteen-year-old son, receives a surprise inheritance: a big house. Yep, girl meets house. This one is a brownstone in Brooklyn. Antonia is an orphan who has changed her name to escape her dark past and evil ex-husband, but her aunt was the housekeeper for the Standish family and inherited the house from Mrs. Standish when the lost heir who was supposed to get it could not be found, and the aunt left it to Antonia.

Meanwhile, Antonia is assigned to edit the latest book by genius Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Kingsley, who was disgraced, jailed, and blinded after he killed a child in a drunken hit-and-run accident. Adam's now out of jail. Antonia had an affair with him thirteen years ago, but he doesn't recognize her because he's blind, and she doesn't tell him who she is. (Much like Lurlene McDaniel's Carley!) In order to facilitate the editing, he moves into her new brownstone, which has a mysterious draft, hidden passageways, and evildoers who want it or something in it. Her ex-husband, who turns out to be a Standish, comes out of the woodwork and blackmails her. I was going to spoiler-cut the next part, but since I don't think anyone else is ever likely to read this I won't; if you don't want to be spoiled for the most ridiculous and unnecessary plot twist ever, stop reading now. Adam turns out to be the missing heir.

This book is chiefly interesting because Antonia's son, animal-obsessed Ewan, is a dry run for Alan in Holland's later YA novel Alan and the Animal Kingdom, in which teen orphan Alan tries to live by himself after his last remaining relative dies, because he has pets and the last time a relative died they were all put to sleep. More spoilers ahead, though again, the book is long since out of print and this isn't a surprise ending...

It concludes on a "realistic" note of sort-of hope amidst the general misery and despair: Alan is adopted, and his pets aren't killed, but he has to give them all away because his new adoptive mother is allergic to animal fur. As a consolation prize, he's given a poodle puppy that he doesn't love. It occurs to me now that this ending isn't really more realistic: a family that would adopt a son on a moment's notice might not hesitate to take in his pets too, and the deadly allergy is just there because a real happy ending, presumably, might give kid readers hope that sometimes things really do work out OK.