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janiemcpants 's review for:
A Girl of the Limberlost
by Gene Stratton-Porter
This book suffers from some values dissonance.
It’s odd to read this with a modern perspective, as a large part of the book is about the beauty of nature, but also about how if you want to be successful, you need to chop down all the trees and start drilling for oil. Elnora may be broke now, but it’ll be okay, because as soon as she inherits her portion of the forest, she’ll put down a few oil wells and take it for all it’s worth. These moths are so beautiful--quick, get the cyanide!
Elnora was probably a good heroine for 1909: smart, self-sufficient, determined to get her education and do it all on her own. Unfortunately, a hundred years later, she’s somewhat boring: beautiful, virtuous, perfect at everything she does, the patience of a saint, and all the other characters (except her mother) constantly go on about how wonderful she is. In the later part of the story, during the battle for sentient block of wood Philip Ammon, I sympathized much more with Edith, who is dismissed as temperamental and shallow, but who I couldn’t help but feel sorry for when her friends deserted her in favor of Elnora, who they’d never even met. She does some self-reflection and comes out a better person, but is thoroughly patronized by everyone around her during the process.
And speaking of Elnora’s mother, Mrs. Comstock did the quickest 180 I’ve ever seen. She neglects and abuses her daughter for most of her life, then finds out one fact and immediately turns into the perfect mother. (And expresses that partly by getting a makeover, because looking pretty and having nice dresses is a surprisingly prevalent theme in this book.) However, since she’s one of the few people to get any actual character development, I can forgive it, because at least it was interesting.
This story also features a couple of things that tend to crop up in books from this era: horrible children who we’re expected to find cute, and animal abuse that we’re expected to find funny. I ended up skipping over almost everything with Billy in it because I just couldn’t stand it.
On the plus side, I learned a lot about moths.
It’s odd to read this with a modern perspective, as a large part of the book is about the beauty of nature, but also about how if you want to be successful, you need to chop down all the trees and start drilling for oil. Elnora may be broke now, but it’ll be okay, because as soon as she inherits her portion of the forest, she’ll put down a few oil wells and take it for all it’s worth. These moths are so beautiful--quick, get the cyanide!
Elnora was probably a good heroine for 1909: smart, self-sufficient, determined to get her education and do it all on her own. Unfortunately, a hundred years later, she’s somewhat boring: beautiful, virtuous, perfect at everything she does, the patience of a saint, and all the other characters (except her mother) constantly go on about how wonderful she is. In the later part of the story, during the battle for sentient block of wood Philip Ammon, I sympathized much more with Edith, who is dismissed as temperamental and shallow, but who I couldn’t help but feel sorry for when her friends deserted her in favor of Elnora, who they’d never even met. She does some self-reflection and comes out a better person, but is thoroughly patronized by everyone around her during the process.
And speaking of Elnora’s mother, Mrs. Comstock did the quickest 180 I’ve ever seen. She neglects and abuses her daughter for most of her life, then finds out one fact and immediately turns into the perfect mother. (And expresses that partly by getting a makeover, because looking pretty and having nice dresses is a surprisingly prevalent theme in this book.) However, since she’s one of the few people to get any actual character development, I can forgive it, because at least it was interesting.
This story also features a couple of things that tend to crop up in books from this era: horrible children who we’re expected to find cute, and animal abuse that we’re expected to find funny. I ended up skipping over almost everything with Billy in it because I just couldn’t stand it.
On the plus side, I learned a lot about moths.