Jen > Recent Status Updates

Okay but where is Kimberly supposed to be from because the audiobook narrator makes her mom definitely Southern, but southerners don't say "parker" for parka, and she often sounds very ... Boston? and then she's lived in NY state and DC?
Honestly, none of this would be a problem in written form, but in audiobook? Don't pick a narrator who can't say "parka" without an R on the end.

1: I thought, "Wait, this is LITERALLY just Beauty and the Beast, isn't it"
2: But the beast is Tam Lin? Like, are we just borrowing his name or is this going to come up later, because it FEELS like it's just borrowed.
The prose is very over-written, there are weird word choices that don't make sense.... waiting to figure out why everybody is so ga-ga over these.

I read Nancy Springer books and enjoyed them as a teen and this one came out when I was no longer a teen, so when I heard the Netflix show was based on a book by NS, I of course wondered if it was one and the same -- it was, so I'm curious to see how I like this one.

It was a surprise to find this book written for tweens to accompany a TV show created to promote a toy line was actually pretty enjoyable. 6yo kept being excited and asking for more chapters at bedtime.

Is this lovely? Yes.
Do I want to engage with it properly right now? Absolutely not.

I feel like I'm bouncing off this one right now and might take a break. It's light and fun and I'm having trouble connecting.

Okay, also, I'm realizing that the male characters... they exist in this world, but they don't actually matter to most of what's going on, it's women dealing with women about women's stories (about ghosts and gods and gangsters). It's so good.

I keep listening to the dialogue in this book and being blown away, because her parents/adult family members speak English in a consistent way that is also clearly not-American (or British, or whatever). It is "wrong", but it's also a very clear dialect with its own quirks and this is the kind of thing white writers/writers from another community simply could not emulate. Brilliant.