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dtbookworm · 3 years

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There’s a special place in The Great Wide Somewhere for people whop are able to write multi narrative stories. And @lizkessler is one of those masters. This is the first novel I’ve read from her and I was taken away with Leo, Elsa, and Max. WWII is such an interesting time period to write about and this story truly captures what happens to innocent kids during war and the joy they feel for one day when the world’s in the palms of their hands. I loved the main characters. Leo, Elsa, and Max (while separated) undergo transformations and experiences that leave them hoping and fighting and conforming. Max, who I think was the strongest of the three, was a very complex character that left me equal parts in awe and in frustration. His need to be a part of something, even if it’s for the supposed “greater good,” made me want to hug him and shake him by the shoulders. I loved Elsa and how caring she was, hanging on to hope like it was the corner of the sun as she was uprooted from her home life in Vienna to being led to a concentration camp. And Leo’s transformation to being the man of the house and moving on with his life made me yearn for him to reconnect with Elsa and Max. There are a few Jewish references that interested me. The Kaddish-prayer of mourning, Judennat-The Jewish council. No way I can remember everything about Jewish culture and I’m glad it’s spaced out here and there. This book broke met heart in the best way as these three kids try to navigate WWII. I don’t want to tell you if they find each other or not, but I’ll tell you this. These kids have hearts that beat for love and light even through the darkness. And that’s all that’s needed. 🎡🌎👦👦👧 “Let’s remember this day forever and ever. Let’s promise never to forget the day we were kings and queens of all of Vienna.” “How rapidly something unthinkable can become commonplace. How easily we let the inconceivable become a new normal. How quickly we learn to stop questioning these things.” “His eyes are a bridge into another world. Another lifetime…And how he is here in front of me and I remember that life is something worth fighting for.” #bookreview #bookrec #bookstagram #mybookfeatures https://www.instagram.com/p/CQcYh_0LPoi/?utm_medium=tumblr

#bookreview #bookrec #bookstagram #mybookfeatures

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yvesdot · 3 years

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I’ve spoken a little about how I feel analysis can brighten anything you like to read, and I’m hoping you’ll indulge me as I prove that with Emily Windsnap (by @lizkessler) and some gender politics. I reread Emily recently, and while I still have an entire series’ worth of material to consider, I found some elements quite interesting through an adult’s more discerning eyes. Keep reading for monsters, gender, and more on the best book of all time.

Those who have read the book (and this is chock-full of spoilers, so I sure hope you have!) will recall that the initial resistance to mer-human marriages is solved by simply speaking to King Neptune and telling him not to be so mean. This is a pretty typical stand-up-and-speak-your-truth children’s fiction ending, but underneath there seems to be quite a bit going on, and perhaps another antagonist altogether.

Any average reader might reasonably wonder, for example, why Emily doesn’t tell her mother that she’s a mermaid—being a mermaid is the coolest thing ever, we think, which is why we are reading the book. We understand her fears that she might be put in a tank by outside observers, and Mandy’s bullying also serves as reasonable cause for alarm, but a girl being a mermaid is the coolest thing in the world. In case you weren’t sure of that, the ending of this book confirms it with one of my favorite scenes of all time, where Emily shows the entire class her mermishness and gets a jaw-drop from Mandy. There’s nothing actually bad about Emily being a mermaid.

Mr. Beeston, on the other hand, reveals his half-mer nature with a fascinating story, which I’ll lay out here in full. For those who don’t recall, this is our half-mer half-human spy for the King.

“The two worlds — they don’t belong together. It doesn’t work.” He leaned forward, his head almost between his knees. “And I should know,” he added, his voice almost a whisper. “You’re not the only one to grow up without a father.” He spoke to the floor. “Mine disappeared the minute I was born, he did. Just like all the others. Fishermen. All very nice having an unusual girlfriend, isn’t it? Taming a beautiful siren. Show off to your friends about that, can’t you?”

A tear fell from his face onto the deck. He brushed his cheek roughly. “But it’s a bit different when your own son sprouts a tail! Don’t want to know then, do you?”

“What are you saying?” Mom’s voice was as tight as her face, her hand still gripping the mast. The sea lifted us up and down; the sail still flapped uselessly over the water.

“You can’t put humans and merfolk together and expect it to work. It doesn’t. All you get is pain.” Finally, Mr. Beeston raised his head to look at us. “I was trying to save you from that. From what I’ve been through myself.”

Let’s put a pin in this analysis and consider whether this book, this entire book, could have been about a merman—that is to say, a young boy finding out he is a merman.

The answer is, obviously, no. The platonic capitalist idea of Boys does not want this book. ‘Boys’ do not dream of becoming mermen. There is not a mutually agreed-upon notion between young men that to be a merman would be the coolest thing in the world. (Unfortunately.)

Why, though? I would argue that it’s for the same reason that Beeston’s father abandons him, and the same reason Beeston immediately “roughly” wipes away the only tear he allows himself to cry—because it’s effeminate. Boys cannot be effeminate.

In some ways, Beeston could be seen as a foil to Jake Windsnap, Emily’s father. Where Beeston sees his perceived effeminacy as a negative, Jake has a more casual attitude to his softness. Compare this scene to Emily’s first look at her father, when she’s accidentally (conveniently) wound up in his cell:

“That was a lucky escape.”

Who said that? I swung around to see a merman sitting on the edge of a bed made of seaweed. He was leaning over a small table and seemed to be working on something, his sparkly purple tail flickering gently.

I looked at him, but I didn’t move from the door. He appeared to put the end of a piece of thread in his mouth and then tied a knot in the other end.

“Got to keep myself busy somehow,” he said somewhat apologetically.

I slunk around the edges of the bubble-shaped room, still keeping my distance. The thread he was sewing with looked as if it was made of gold, with beads of some kind strung on it in rainbow colors.

“You’re making a necklace?”

“Bracelet, actually. Got a problem with that?” The merman looked up for the first time, and I backed away instinctively. Don’t make fun of criminals whose cells you’ve just barged into, I told myself. Never a good idea if you’re planning to get out again in one piece.

Except he didn’t look like a criminal. Not how I usually imagine a criminal to look, anyway. He didn’t look mean and hard. And he was making jewelry. He had short black hair, kind of wavy, a tiny ring in one ear. A white vest with a blue prison jacket over it. His tail sparkled as much as the bracelet. As I looked at him, he ran his hand through his hair. There was something familiar about the way he did it, although I couldn’t think what.

This is ripe for psychological evaluation (as am I for obsessing over this scene). Jake is making art—specifically, jewelry. He seems both “apologetic” and yet somehow defensive about it—”Got a problem with that?”

His jewelry, in fact, is one reason Emily winds up trusting him, even before she knows he’s her father. Putting aside the stereotyping of criminals in children’s literature, she says he doesn’t look “mean and hard”, and seconds later we have the introduction of an earring (which ear is it in? Kessler doesn’t tell us!) and a sparkly tail. It’s Jake’s very effeminacy that makes him trustworthy, and specifically non-intimidating.

Another fun little line:

I couldn’t take my eyes off the poem. “You...”

“Yeah, I know. Jewelry, poetry. What next, eh?” He made a face.

What IS next? No, seriously, what is he implying? He’s obviously joking about the fact that he has two stereotypically feminine hobbies. So this is a world where misogyny is, at least on some level, alive and well, and that the characters are aware of it. There is an undercurrent in this book of gender politics.

Finally, let’s consider Neptune.

“It’s the one thing that makes Neptune really angry. Some say it’s because he once married a human and then she left him.”

“Neptune’s married?” I swam up to join her.

“Oh, he’s got loads of wives, and hundreds of children! But this one was special, and he’s never forgiven her — or the rest of the human race!”

Why aren’t humans and mermaids allowed to marry? Not because of a mutually agreed upon hatred pact—because one merman has a grudge. One merman with “loads of wives”, who nonetheless is so angry at a woman for leaving him that he has meddled with the laws for everyone in his kingdom. One might well argue that the monarchy is inherently corrupt, but that’s for another blogger.

You may wonder where I am going with this. Alright, so the characters are aware of misogyny, and the antagonist king is misogynistic, and the book was published in a society whose misogyny shaped its creation… and so what?

Well, I think the problem, the antagonist, the Big Bad of Emily Windsnap is misogyny. Of course, you can’t ‘cure’ misogyny. Bigotry is not defeated with a big climactic scene and a good speech.

Kessler fought against Section 28 in the UK unsuccessfully and was facing an inability to publish her first, openly lesbian, book at this time. I wondered while reading whether Kessler might be aware of, perhaps purposefully including, these undercurrents; my impression based on her past blogs is that she merely, like most of us, winds up writing about what she is thinking and feeling. You cannot write a mermaid book without bumping into gender politics, because mermaids, like all monsters, are gendered—and kudos to Kessler’s brother for calling her on her obvious coming out narrative (though with the body politics, I like to think that Emily might be trans!)

I recall that later in the series Emily gets herself a boyfriend, who is of course a merman—because women tend to find feminine qualities in men quite attractive. It is impossible to sum up “women’s attitudes towards feminine men” in a sentence, of course, so this is merely another area one might look into regarding gender in Emily.

And finally, to bring things back to analysis at large—this is what I’m talking about when I talk about analysis. You don’t have to bring one singular argument, you don’t have to say something is good or bad, you don’t have to assume the author intended anything in particular, and you don’t have to prove that your analysis is ‘right’. (What is a correct analysis?)

I like to think that the purpose of this sort of discussion is merely to bring something to the table. This might make us think about how monsters reflect our society, how gender and sex affect our experiences of the world, how children’s books retain political messages, or how AP Lit led me here. And isn’t it cool to think that I might have noticed something Kessler herself didn’t, or that I might be connecting with something she left for me to find?

I personally enjoy searching deeper for the secrets in my favorite monster media, and a good discussion always makes me happy. I hope you’ll have something to say, too.

#I hope you guys don’t think I’m joking when I praise books written for young women.#It’s so confusing to me that writing about one’s struggles and soothing other’s struggles is all very cool when it’s about war and ManThings #--but should a woman write to young girls a book intended to help them survive this world and grow up with a safe place to land then it is--#--somehow not the most important thing in the world.#Ridiculous!#You know I am only here to promote love of children particularly little girls. What little girls read is of utmost importance.#(Signed Lewis Carroll.)#Anyway Liz Kessler if you read this THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE! I’m sure you’ve saved some lives.#You’ve certainly brightened mine ^__^#yves talks #yves talks reading #yves talks books #txt #bookblr #litblr #writeblr #literary analysis #monsters #gender analysis #symbolism #emily windsnap #the tail of emily windsnap

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