Review - "Future Leaders of Nowhere"

Future Leaders of Nowhere
by Emily O'Beirne
rating: ☆☆☆
published: 15th March 2017
spoilers? no

Goodreads

Galley provided by publisher

This book was so cute. Unfortunately, it often felt to me like there's not much more to it than that. Instead of having the camp with its political games as the central plot, and the romance the side plot, it has it the other way round, which leaves the side plot not so fully fleshed out as it could have been, and the romance is not quite strong enough to carry the book on its own.

The writing at times felt a little too much like purple prose, meaning I had points where I just kind of rolled my eyes and prayed for the story to move along already. I mean, you get things like "Because she is. Finn earths", which makes no sense. What is "to earth" even supposed to mean? That she's down to earth? Or that she's solid? Who knows.

Then there was a lot from both girls going on about how wonderful/amazing/brilliant the other was, and okay I get they're smitten but I don't need pages going on about it. It also seemed that neither would be able to admit to a fault in the other, which doesn't make for all that interesting characters, on the whole.

There were a couple of great moments later in the book, the first where Finn was like to Craig "you know bisexuality is a thing" after he points out she's been with a guy before. And the second was when Amira called Amy out for criticising her using her sexuality to get guys' doing what she wanted, and also vaguely slutshaming her. It was so wonderful. And there are so many good girl friendships going on in this book. I loved it.

Review - "The Broken Bridge"

The Broken Bridge
by Philip Pullman
rating: ☆
published: 2nd May 2017
spoilers? yes

Goodreads

Galley provided by publisher

DNF @ 45%

To be honest, I was disappointed by this one. I don't know if it's me misremembering how good Philip Pullman's writing is, or it's because this is an earlier one of his than His Dark Materials, but I was just underwhelmed by it.

The Broken Bridge tells the story of a mixed race girl growing up in a small, Welsh village in the 1990s. One day, she finds out that her dad wasn't married to her mother, as she had thought, but instead to another woman, and he'd had a child with her, before meeting Ginny's mother (meanwhile, not having divorced the first woman). And that revelation takes up the first half of the book. It's pretty tedious, to be honest. I was expecting some fantasy aspect to the book, but there was none.

It's understandable that if you're writing about a mixed race child growing up in a small, presumably relatively isolated, village in the 90s, you're going to have to touch on racism and microaggressions at some point. That's surely to be expected. Except every time Pullman approached the subject, he managed to make a mess of it. There is some clear internalised racism going on, made especially so when Ginny, who's mother is Haitian and studied art, refers to Haitian artists as "primitives".

"The lady from Haiti? They have a lot of painters there." "Yeah," Ginny said, "primitives. Peasants. I know about them. But she wasn't like that. I can't be, either. See, once you know about Picasso and stuff, Matisse, all the modern painters, well, you can't pretend to be a peasant who's never seen them.... You're stuck, really. You can't go back; you've got to go forward. My mother, she was studying art properly, like I'm going to do." "European art," Stuart said.

Ginny, herself an aspiring artist, should surely know better than to value the European artists over another style of art, let alone refer to that different style of art (coincidentally one with non-white artists) as primitive or lesser. It also seems that Pullman is using Stuart, a white guy, to tell her that this is a dubious opinion to hold. Especially when he goes on to tell her about Haiti, from his perspective (granted it's because she doesn't know because she's never been, but couldn't she have read about it at least?).

At this point, I just gave up. Coupled with the fact that the other black character, a boy who has been adopted by white parents, refers to himself as "a white kid with a black face" - which I get is intended to reference the fact he doesn't feel like he fits in anywhere but instead feels uncomfortable coming from a white author - I just had to stop.