(That's one thing that bothers me about relatively recent media: it's assumed that girls and women have to be highly opinionated and unafraid to get in fights, if they're going to be liberated. Peyton herself was a demonstration that female characters do not need to be outspoken or scrappy to be complex and independent. I was worried for a while that Nora, as a Blithe Spirit, would turn into an infallible, Christ-like figure, but Siddons found the right combination of making her a free-wheeling revolutionary and flawed.
This book did not strike me as sticking to a blueprint. Her character is vividly drawn as the quiet, timid yet stubborn girl who obstinately identifies as a misfit, refusing her obnoxiously feminine aunt's attempts to make her into a "lady." Peyton warms to the newcomer with un-Southern ways, who is utterly unlike Peyton except that they both are uninterested in letting other people tell them what to do. Siddons writes in the believable style of a precocious 12-year-old girl, so I could get inside Peyton's head. Sometimes I think my taste for reading is fading, until I read a book and wind up liking it, which renews my hope and reminds me I'm probably just reading the wrong books.
0 kommentar(er)
