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nuevecuervos 's review for:
The Tale of Despereaux
by Kate DiCamillo
My four-and-a-half-year-old loves books, reading, words, and all of the trappings of the voracious bibliophibian lifestyle of our people. She'll sit still for hours if you have the fortitude to read for that long, and she follows plot threads pretty well. As a result, I started reading her long, involved chapter books before bedtime, in mostly manageable chunks, and The Tale of Despereaux was the second such.
I have a lot of thoughts about this one. The language is gorgeous, the story is not kind, nor does she pull punches at all in terms of death and sad, hard things to an extent that I had to skip the specific details of a couple of particularly harsh descriptions (one bit where a character dies of fear in the dungeon, and the part about the guards finding his body). The last couple of chapters were a emotional gut punch, and both the kidlet and I loved it. It engendered so many amazing discussions about revenge and forgiveness and broken hearts over the course of several weeks, and taught her the word "perfidy". Amazeballs. Honestly.
Problematically however, DiCamillo loves to use "fat" as a pejorative description for the less favored characters in the book. Mig, the serving girl, who is both mostly deaf and intellectually challenged due to serial abuse, is described as both fat (but with a teeny tiny head) AND lazy (though the descriptions of her misdeeds in the book tend closer to weird wrongfooted shit kids get up to and just plain fish-out-of-water cluelessness; we see no actual evidence of laziness except for her fatness); the Cook who hates mice in her kitchen (fair!) and is near hysteria when the princess goes missing is also of course, fat, and happily described as such. I honestly had to choose not to read the bits where her 'fat hands' or fat belly or fat whatever were being used as a descriptor. I mean, speaking of lazy, this stereotype is ridiculous lazy writing; who amongst you has a fat mom/wife/person-you-don't-hate and which of you brave souls wants to call her 'lazy'? because I'm tubby as fuck but I will punch you in your dickparts if you even try. I don't care if I'm overidentifying; I'm saying, if you make a character whose motivations and situation make it obvious she's going to get and stay fat, the least you can do is not demonize her for it.
I'm always happy to see fat people in books. I am less happy when they are the Stupid Friend, the Ugly Friend, the Slovenly Cautionary Tale, the disgruntled Jurassic Park IT guy, etc. We are literally just people. Some of us are awesome, some of us are assholes, like everyone else. All of us are not your lazy, food-worshipping sidekicks, and fuck off if you think this is the case.
Put another way-- take the word 'fat' out of my last two paragraphs. Now replace it with 'black', 'gay', 'muslim', or your arbitrary choice of human description. It gets exponentially not ok, am I right? Bah.
But the book is absolutely gorgeous otherwise, so what do we do? Do we cast it into the pile of books that would have been luminous except for how they mistreat a particular section of the population? It really is brilliant otherwise, but it definitely underscores the importance of reading along with your kids and discussing the shit out of everything.
I have a lot of thoughts about this one. The language is gorgeous, the story is not kind, nor does she pull punches at all in terms of death and sad, hard things to an extent that I had to skip the specific details of a couple of particularly harsh descriptions (one bit where a character dies of fear in the dungeon, and the part about the guards finding his body). The last couple of chapters were a emotional gut punch, and both the kidlet and I loved it. It engendered so many amazing discussions about revenge and forgiveness and broken hearts over the course of several weeks, and taught her the word "perfidy". Amazeballs. Honestly.
Problematically however, DiCamillo loves to use "fat" as a pejorative description for the less favored characters in the book. Mig, the serving girl, who is both mostly deaf and intellectually challenged due to serial abuse, is described as both fat (but with a teeny tiny head) AND lazy (though the descriptions of her misdeeds in the book tend closer to weird wrongfooted shit kids get up to and just plain fish-out-of-water cluelessness; we see no actual evidence of laziness except for her fatness); the Cook who hates mice in her kitchen (fair!) and is near hysteria when the princess goes missing is also of course, fat, and happily described as such. I honestly had to choose not to read the bits where her 'fat hands' or fat belly or fat whatever were being used as a descriptor. I mean, speaking of lazy, this stereotype is ridiculous lazy writing; who amongst you has a fat mom/wife/person-you-don't-hate and which of you brave souls wants to call her 'lazy'? because I'm tubby as fuck but I will punch you in your dickparts if you even try. I don't care if I'm overidentifying; I'm saying, if you make a character whose motivations and situation make it obvious she's going to get and stay fat, the least you can do is not demonize her for it.
I'm always happy to see fat people in books. I am less happy when they are the Stupid Friend, the Ugly Friend, the Slovenly Cautionary Tale, the disgruntled Jurassic Park IT guy, etc. We are literally just people. Some of us are awesome, some of us are assholes, like everyone else. All of us are not your lazy, food-worshipping sidekicks, and fuck off if you think this is the case.
Put another way-- take the word 'fat' out of my last two paragraphs. Now replace it with 'black', 'gay', 'muslim', or your arbitrary choice of human description. It gets exponentially not ok, am I right? Bah.
But the book is absolutely gorgeous otherwise, so what do we do? Do we cast it into the pile of books that would have been luminous except for how they mistreat a particular section of the population? It really is brilliant otherwise, but it definitely underscores the importance of reading along with your kids and discussing the shit out of everything.