bennysbooks's Reviews (668)

I dunno lads, it's just not workin for me. Can't connect with the characters, don't feel drawn into the socialite plot. Maybe one day. 

Worth the purchase for Prickle Moon alone, honestly. Loved that story so much. It was as cozy as it was heartwrenching, and I'm glad to have it on my shelves. I enjoyed the next few stories but they haven't stuck with me much. And then the second half lost steam. I'll circle back to read the last three stories eventually, and maybe they'll be better than the middle section, but I had to take a break. 

Took me a while to get through, been in a massive reading slump. But I did keep coming back! The writing was addictive despite the meandering plot. If you like beautiful descriptive writing and insightful glimpses into the lives of unlikeable characters, you'll probably enjoy this. Otherwise it's skippable. Not my personal favourite, but glad I finally got around to it. 

I don't know if it's me or the book (I haven't finished anything on my own in months now, so probably me). I sensed some magic here, but it's not capturing my attention. 

This was fine, but I only have 3 days left on my Libby loan period and I'm neither deep enough nor invested enough to finish that quickly. Might try again one day. 

I was one of those readers who, upon finishing Who's That Girl, thought McFarlane had left out the most interesting part (how these two characters with entirely different lifestyles, and who were determined to follow their current courses, could make a relationship work) of the story. Unfortunately, after reading the sequel, I've concluded that McFarlane made the exact same mistake again. You Belong With Me is not about how Elliot and Edie make it work; it's about Edie and Elliot dithering about making it work, letting some of the same wounds and stressors from the first book dominate their relationship, and then deciding to be together despite everything. Because LOVE. 

The usual McFarlane wins are in evidence here: the humour spoke to me, and the platonic relationships surrounding the MCs were charming and integral to the plot (albeit maybe less integral than book one). That's what keeps me coming back. I just don't know that this story evolved enough from the original to have been worthwhile. Sounds harsh, but it just felt like a rehash rather than a continuation. 

I still want to know HOW they make it work. Does Elliot move back to Nottingham one day? Does she work remotely and travel more often to visit him in the States? Do they have a timeline for him limiting the types of roles and commitments he takes on? How does Edie learn to manage her own feelings about the spotlight, or their income desparity? I found myself wishing she would choose Declan, because it seemed to me that Elliot was onto something about not being able to give her the life she wanted. But I could have been convinced otherwise if McFarlane spent less time having Edie dither and more time having Edie and Elliot communicate and plan. 

In the end I still love Edie and her world, Elliot and Fraser are charming as ever, but I'm not convinced of them as a couple. 

3 stars from me, 1 mill stars from my (nearly) 7-year old

The kid was totally enchanted by this book. His eyes filled with tears when he realized we had finished (there are pages of questions/previews at the end, so he thought we had more time), and he went to sleep with it beside his bed. He felt the magic of this story, that's certain. 

I, in my hopelessly adult way, had qualms. There was a lot to love here: it was very fairytale-esque, dark and dramatic, with sweeping emotional pronouncements about light and dark, about the power of stories, about forgiveness. I know I would have loved it as a kid, too. But so much of it felt uncomfortably conservative to me. I don't know a lot about the author's life, but if I had to guess I would bet she holds some old-school religious values about good and evil. Not that everyone "bad" was irredeemably evil (Roscuro and Mig achieve some level of redemption by the end), but that the characters who were inherently good, incorruptible, were also inherently beautiful (Pea) or cute (Despereaux). And the ugly (Roscuro) or dumb (Mig) or poor (Mig's father) characters were easily corruptible and needed to be "saved" by the light of the beautiful ones. 

There is a reading of Roscuro's arc where he had the propensity for good in him at the outset, but it was squashed by the way people (Pea) reacted to his ugliness. Even so, the text doesn't challenge the belief that you can ascertain someone's goodness from their appearance or station, it merely maintains that forgiveness is the only way to preserve your own light, and that your light may ease some of the darkness in others. So, in the end, that generous reading of Roscuro is nullified because his heart was "hardened" at the first real challenge to his pursuit of light and his own self-perception. He was destined to be evil after all.

I was particularly horrified by the treatment of Miggery Sow - the name(!), the way the author heaped trauma onto her, the fact that she was described as ugly (I can't remember if that word was actually used, but the descriptions, coupled with the artwork, conveyed enough), fat, and dumb. Characters like Mig are fine to include in your story, but the portrayal was abject and pitiable rather than compassionate. Though she was shown compassion in the end, it was meant to show the goodness of Pea, not the inherent worth of Miggery Sow. I think Mig deserved more. It had me reflecting on the portrayal of Thick in Hobbs' RotE; Thick is written as being a "half-wit", and has a similarly tragic backstory, a similar moment of corruptibility, but is written with love and agency so that he comes to feel like a real, valuable member of the cast of characters (rather than merely a tool depicting trauma or a foil for goodness, which is what Mig felt like by the end). 

Anyway, I honestly don't know how to feel about this book now that we're done. I'm ecstatic that my kid is becoming an obsessive bookworm, and I'm not at all opposed to kids reading dark plots or encountering imperfect representation (especially when it leads to thoughtful discussion, which it did here - when I shared with him my feelings about Mig, he said he believed that she just wasn't on her "right path" yet, and we had a good little chat about what that meant). But I'm definitely curious to learn more about DiCamillo's worldview as we read through her works.