Friday, September 21, 2007

RR on Rosie

Writer Rebecca Rosenblum has kindly filed her book report on Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls:

The nice thing about Rosie Little is that the central character is often wrong. Chicklit these days (ok, I haven’t read most chicklit, but what I come across) mainly has central characters who are never wrong. Rosie Little’s is far more interesting than a character created in order to alleviate some girl-power discrepancy. Rosie Little just lives her life, and more importantly, watches others live theirs. She is empathetic and reflective, and stupid about certain things. The men in this book are mainly one dimensional and often idealized (or demonized)but I’m not sure that was the writer’s failure of skill or the character’s failure of perception. Which is an interesting question, I think.

This book is billed as a novel [but…] I didn’t think it was much like one. I still don’t, but it is much like a life,
episodic and puzzling and unlikely to climax with a big prize.

I liked it, and I liked it despite the fact that the narrator refers to an erect p*nis as a “sweetmeat” quite early on, which would normally qualify the whole thing for disqualification outright.