I’m trying to write a lot these days. Writing things that I feel neither confident about or certain are worth writing, and so I spend a lot of time plagued with self-doubt. Enter Ramona Quimby, whose name I consistently misremember and mispronounce as Ramona Quimbly. I first met Ramona as a child, probably aged 8 or 9. I remember reading her stories and thinking ‘yes!’ and feeling like I understood everything Ramona went through. I loved that bad things happened to Ramona, but that she continued on being brave, being peppy, and giving her all to the world. So now, much older, when I have my occasional moments (or as of late, my frequent moments) of insecurity – when I feel exactly as I did at aged 9 when I wasn’t quite sure whether anything I did was right, or mattered – I return to Ramona. I’ve been on a bit of a stint: reading ‘Ramona the Brave’, ‘Ramona Quimby: Aged 8’, and ‘Beezus and Ramona.’ I don’t know whether the books themselves bring me comfort, or whether reading them reminds me of being 9 and well looked after by my parents, but whatever the cause, reading Ramona makes things feel better. I can’t in good conscience recommend Ramona, because perhaps you never read her as a child, or perhaps you don’t identify with precocious, misunderstood little girls, so maybe I’ll just suggest that you read it if you’re interested in finding out what it’s like to be a little kid and overwhelmed by the world. Or maybe returning to your own childhood “yes!’ book – because they really do make everything feel a little bit better.
Category Archives: Young Adult Fiction
The Forest of Hands and Teeth: Choices
The Forest of Hands and Teeth has a compelling opening: zombies, sacrifice, and the introduction of the central preoccupation of the novel, choice. The opening sequence also gestures to the mysteries of the novel: the role of the Sisterhood and the possibility of a world beyond the forest.
The zombies are never mysterious. Their existence is explained as the result of a disease only affecting humans that spread many generations ago; their ‘final’ deaths are possible only by decapitation. The zombies, or the ‘Unconsecrated,’ function as a symbol for the barriers that keep individuals from pursuing ambitions or desires, as catalysts for characters to make decisions (to stay behind the fences? to kill a loved one if they are infected? to kill the self? to settle rather than risk infection?) and to a much lesser degree, as provocateurs, inviting the question of what it means to be human (memory? speech? empathy? selflessness?).
The end of the narrative leaves the reader with little question that Mary’s decision has been the right one, and that she considers her sacrifices – though difficult – worthwhile. I had hoped for a more complex conclusion, one that might leave Mary and the reader with more to consider. As it is, the narrative asks the question: is your life and the life of everyone you love worth sacrificing in order to prove the existence of ‘the beyond’ (here, an obviously Christian ‘beyond’ of baptism, confession and redemption) and, frustratingly, answers the question.
Filed under Fiction, Young Adult Fiction
Literary Vice 