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For the, like, three of you who don't read

mistful, she has a nice rant on the idea of not liking female characters. And by "nice" I mean "as hysterically funny as usual".

And we all know that Susan turns away from Narnia in the end anyway, in a very specifically female way. (Well, I guess Edmund could have turned away from Narnia in the same way, but that would be an intrinsically hilarious scene.)

PETER THE MAGNIFICENT: My brother Edmund is no longer a friend to Narnia.
ASLAN: Oh that's a pity.
PETER THE MAGNIFICENT: All he thinks about parading around in nylons and lipstick!
ASLAN: ... Say what?
PETER THE MAGNIFICENT: DON'T ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT IT!

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THE NARNIA TRAUMA! I CANNOT ESCAPE IT LATELY!

~~That is so much better than what really happened, though...~~

Have you read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by

pameladean? Two (high school?) girls are talking to each other, and one says of a mutual friend, -"She thinks you can wear makeup and still go to Narnia."- :)

No! I hav not heard of this book before! What's it about?

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary! They are middle school and high school age sisters with academic-type parents who do things like naming their kids after plants. Gentian, who wants to be an astronomer, has a best friend who wants to be a poet, and this is the first place I ever heard of Edna St. Vincent Millay, when those two interests meet in the sonnet, "His heatless room the watcher of the stars / Nightly inhabits when the night is clear..."

It's sort of urban magic and magic realism, and a teenage boy moves into the area and stirs up trouble between the sisters. We sort of suspect he is some kind of fairy or supernatural being, but because Dean likes complex, knotty, understated plots that don't necessary tie up lose ends or give you all the answers, we never really know. It's all about the emotional journey, anyway. It's the kind of book where the most interesting individual events are throwing a Halloween party, nothing blows up, nobody dies, and the climax is surprising and understated and anti-climactic, but nevertheless chokes me up with its emotional resonance to real adolescent feelings.

Pamela Dean is absolutely one of my favorite authors ever, and her entry in the Fairy Tales series, Tam Lin, which is a retelling of the classic ballad set in a midwestern college in the 1970s, and is wonderful, emotionally true depiction of the college experience which also has fairies in the Classics department, happens to be my favorite book of all time; it is impossible for me to begin to read it and not finish. The Secret Country trilogy (The Secret Country, The Hidden Lands, and The Whim of the Dragon) is one of those minor cult fantasies classics among people who like Diana Wynne Jones, and the side-story novel set in the same universe, The Dubious Hills, is simultaneously a lovely book and an amazing fictional exploration of the nature of knowledge.

That... would have been epic.

That's a really great post. Thanks for pointing it out. The Chronicles of Narnia thing totally made me snorfle. Oh, C.S. Lewis. Why couldn't you have done that instead? It would have been so much more awesome! XD

mistful is so funny in her posts that when her book comes out next June, I shall buy it even though it's normally of the sort of urban fantasy genre that I burned out on long ago. :D

I am one of those three people, so thanks for pointing that out! I enjoyed it very much.

I have slightly different Narnia trauma, but there's more than enough to go around!

I also liked the bit about Watson and Holmes. It is true and hilarious, and the first person who ever gave me Doyle to read, a middle school English teacher, snarked about it in class.

I will be giggling about "COCAINE IS BAD FOR YOU, SHERLOCK" all day.

I was actually very pleased to see that mistful thinks it's OK not to like some of the female characters out there. I had been feeling rather battered and bruised with regard to my preference for (and in many cases, identifiction with) the male leads in a number of the books I have loved for years.

Yeah, there's a huge difference between "I don't like female characters" and "I don't like this female character."

And in most cases it's not even "I don't like this female character." It's "I really like this particular male character; his POV feels comfy to me."

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