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balletbookworm 's review for:
Taylor Swift by the Book: The Literature Behind the Lyrics, from Fairy Tales to Tortured Poets
by Tiffany Tatreau, Rachel Feder
fast-paced
3.5 stars
I like the idea of this book, and it came out much different than I expected. It does cherry-pick lines from the songs to make thematic references (which got old after a while) but it did point out less-common literary or poetic devices (which was kind of cool).
However, for a book from an academic as lead author (I own The Darcy Myth but haven't read it yet), I was surprised to find some really lazy scholarship. The most glaring, imo, was mis-attribution of the speaker of a very important speech from Jane Eyre. It took me maybe 15 seconds to download my ebook of JE, search that speech, and fact-check that the speaker is Rochester, not Jane (because, to paraphrase Cher from Clueless, well, I know Michael Fassbender, and the "invisible string" speech is given to him and not Mia Wasikowska - and this mis-attribution occurred more than once). Additionally, for the one song that Taylor herself has publicly noted the inspiration - Rebecca for "tolerate it" - the authors really missed an opportunity to do a deep-dive on that text and song. That should have been a full chapter.
A fun read overall, but could have been better.
I like the idea of this book, and it came out much different than I expected. It does cherry-pick lines from the songs to make thematic references (which got old after a while) but it did point out less-common literary or poetic devices (which was kind of cool).
However, for a book from an academic as lead author (I own The Darcy Myth but haven't read it yet), I was surprised to find some really lazy scholarship. The most glaring, imo, was mis-attribution of the speaker of a very important speech from Jane Eyre. It took me maybe 15 seconds to download my ebook of JE, search that speech, and fact-check that the speaker is Rochester, not Jane (because, to paraphrase Cher from Clueless, well, I know Michael Fassbender, and the "invisible string" speech is given to him and not Mia Wasikowska - and this mis-attribution occurred more than once). Additionally, for the one song that Taylor herself has publicly noted the inspiration - Rebecca for "tolerate it" - the authors really missed an opportunity to do a deep-dive on that text and song. That should have been a full chapter.
A fun read overall, but could have been better.