I will try and do some regular posts on various authors/books that I love/hate (I say hate because who doesn't love a good rant? Stay tuned for Veronica Roth's Divergent, people. I'm only 50 pages in and I just know a rant is coming on). I also have two or three films in mind that I want to screencap, so hopefully I'll do another Screencap Saturday soon.
My reading lately has mostly consisted of Melina Marchetta material. I received Saving Francesa as a requested gift last Christmas and read it for the first time a couple of months ago. It is now on my (depressingly short) mental list of 'most-loved YA books'. I have since read two other Marchetta books and am currently consuming a fourth. So let's blog about why this writer-lady is so brilliant, in order of book-publication-date, even though I didn't read her books in that order.
First up, Melina Marchetta writes Looking for Alibrandi, not to be confused with John Green's similarly-titled novel, Looking for Alaska. Published in 1992, Alibrandi is Marchetta's debut novel. Here's a quick blurb from Penguin:
Josephine Alibrandi is seventeen and in her final year at a wealthy girls' school. This is the year she meets her father, the year she falls in love, the year she searches for Alibrandi and finds the real truth about her family – and the identity she has been searching for.
Upon picking the book up from the library and settling down to start it, I expected the story to be somewhat dated; it would be about ten years before Marchetta published her second novel, Saving Francesa. But what makes Marchetta such a great writer is that aside from some unavoidable fashion and technology references, the story in general stands the test of time. Marchetta's characters, including protagonist Josephine Alibrandi, are relatable to their target audience (roughly aged 12-16), and Marchetta's early writing style, albiet slightly clunkier on these pages than in her later books, is pleasantly varied and easy to read.
Marchetta's writing style only gets better - which is expected, seeing as she had so much time to practice. It wasn't until 2003 that Saving Francesa hit the book stores and graced everyone with its much-needed presence. The story is about a sixteen-year-old girl trying to save her social life (whilst attending a "co-ed" school that only recently opened its doors to year 11 and 12 girls), her family (now that her usually spirited mother Mia is suddenly suffering from a heavy depression), and hardest of all, herself.
The beauty of Francesca comes from the titular character's raw honesty and relatability, even though as the narrator she doesn't quite realise how honest she is. It is easy for almost any teenage girl to identify with her - from her annoyance at not being allowed to watch Buffy at her aunt's house, to her desperation to be part of a group despite how obviously awful the girls in that clique can be to her. We've all been there at one point in our lives; I can't even count how many times I nodded my head and thought 'yes, I know exactly how you feel' when reading Francesca's emotionally-complex narrative.
My favorite detail in the novel was Francesca's tendency to call people by their full names, or by their first names, in the case of her mother. She refers to the girls in her class as "Justine Kalinsky", "Siobhan Sullivan", and "Tara Finke", distancing herself from them while she deals with her tense family life on her own. Until at one point about halfway through the novel, this happens:
I ring up Michaela from Stella's and ask her if she'd like to do something. I try to remember what made our relationship work in the past. Was it because she had a sense of humor and treated me well? And if it was because of that, why did I feel so grateful that people treated me well?
But Michaela can't do anything tonight. She's having a sleepover at Natalia's. I want to invite myself over, but I keep on thinking she'll invite me instead.
But she doesn't.
So I ring Justine Kalinsky and I say, 'It's Francesca Spinelli', and she says, 'Francesca, you've got to stop using last names. How are you doing?', and I say, 'I feel like shit,' and I don't know how it happened, but by eight o'clock that night, I'm lying next to her on the couch with Siobhan and Tara and we're eating junk food and watching a Keanu movie.
And I want to stay on that couch for the rest of my life.
It's from this point onwards that Francesca ceases the full name use. It's also at this point that she accepts what she's been subconsciously trying to deny - these girls that she's been trying to distance herself from, they're her real friends. They're the ones who care. And that moment, when she realises ... that's what makes this book so beautiful.
Marchetta's third novel is On the Jellicoe Road (2006). Here's your basic back-cover-blurb to get you up to speed:
"Taylor Markham is not a popular choice. She is erratic, has no people skills and never turns up to meetings. Not to mention the incident when she ran off in search of her mother and only got halfway there. But she's lived at Jellicoe School most of her life and as leader of the boarders that's her greatest asset. Especially now the cadets, led by the infamous Jonah Griggs, have arrived. The territory wars between the boarders, townies and cadets are about to recommence.
"But Taylor has other things on her mind: a prayer tree, the hermit who whispered in her ear, and a vaguely familiar drawing in the local police station. Taylor wants to understand the mystery of her own past. But Hannah, the woman who found her, has suddenly disappeared, leaving nothing but an unfinished manuscript about five kids whose lives entwined twenty years ago on the Jellicoe Road."
The first chapter or two of this novel is, to be honest, shockingly clunky. It took me a while to work out what was actually going on - who Taylor was, how old she was, what her relation to the characters around her was and also what the slightly confusing italicised story-within-the-story chapters were. But then I got there. Taylor is a pretty selfish person to begin with, but to Marchetta's credit instead of annoying the heck out of the reader by trying to force us to like this character anyway, she lets us side with Taylor's friends for a little while, who frequently point out her faults, while Marchetta carefully reveals the rest of Taylor's character layer by layer, and I began to like her a lot more as the story went on. In the end it was probably the characters that drove me to finish the book, because I liked the different relationships and the way they all interacted with one another. I'm pretty fascinated with the way people relate and connect with other people, and I enjoyed that aspect of the book.
The major problem with this novel, aside from the clunky beginning, was the failure to establish exactly WHAT kind of world we were living in. I couldn't get a handle on whether the story was supposed to be completely "real life" or if there were moments when we were submerged in the overactive imagination of the main characters. If the former, it wasn't very believable in places - the lack of adult supervision for these secluded-boarding-school students was a little worrying at times, particularly when the teenage characters got into fights. Taylor's friend Ben is hurt pretty badly in one scene, and I didn't find it at all believable that there were no teachers around to break things up or sort things out after the ordeal, so the only explanation I could come up with for this was that Taylor (as the 1st person narrator) had exaggerated the incident and Ben was really as hurt as she'd made him out to be. I get annoyed when my narrator is unreliable so neither option was working for me anyway.
Despite all the issues I had with it, I found Jellicoe crazily addictive. One night during my reading I was less than two thirds of the way through the book and was suddenly overcome with a desperate desire to KNOW THE ENDING RIGHT NOW. Not one to peek or skim ahead, I stayed up til 1:30 in the morning finishing the silly thing. And I liked it. If you've enjoyed Marchetta's other books, I'd say give this one a go, but don't make it the first one you read.
At this point, Marchetta changes genres and delves into the world of Fantasy with Finnikin of the Rock. I have about fifty pages left of this one, so if I loathe the ending I may have to come back and update this post. It's always risky talking about a book you haven't finished, especially if you're telling people you like it before you've read the ending (*cough*hungergamesseries*cough*).
I could get you a plot blurb for Finnikin, but I'm such a hater of "ye 'old cliched Fantasy blurb" that I'm going to skip that and just tell you about it myself.
Basically, Finnkin is this young man who spends pretty much the entire book Walking the Earth with a typical mentor character Sir Topher. They end up travelling a girl named Evanjalin (another thing I hate about high Fantasy - authors screwing around with typical spelling for something more "exotic". Can't she just be called Evangeline? I mean really, Marlina.), who claims that the long-lost-king is alive and she can lead them to him. Which basically means that the first few chapters are LOADED with Infodumps about said long-lost-king and his connection to the land and to Finnikin and all that jazz.
Seeing as she spent so much time on world-building I could tell Marchetta was enjoying the genre change. She particularly enjoyed the freedom that she had to torture her characters in ways that you can't really do in a 'real-world' story. By the time I was halfway through the book, the lead characters either endured or were revealed to have endured between them: punch-ups, sword-fights, strangling, ambushes, branding, thievery, defensive killing, numerous battle wounds, and attempted rape (probably loads of other things too that I've forgotten about). Oh, and let's not forget all the name-calling, of course. We are in a Fantasy novel, after all!
Once again there was something about the characters and the writing style that gripped me, and I found myself taking the book to work and devouring a few pages on my break. I was thinking about it A LOT, which is a big deal for me when I'm reading a book. I kept wondering what was going to happen next.
Now, if you're planning on reading the book, here's the part I can't help but mention, but beware, VAGUE SPOILERS AHEAD (I say vague because I'm only really giving stuff away if you're a cluey kind of reader. I'm not so cluey).
I was pretty ok with all the happenings of this story until I got within the last third of the book. Remember, I still haven't finished it yet, so I may have to update if my opinion on the ending changes.... But CURRENTLY I am pretty annoyed. You know that moment when something predictable shows up on the horizon of the novel, and you're like "nah, I trust this author. She'll do something different. There'll be a different twist that's not so predictable"...
And then before you're ready, the unfortunate King Incognito trope, coupled with its typical partner in crime Not Quite Dead comes crashing down upon the story in all its glorious clichedness. AND to make matters worse, the ever-hated (by me, anyway) LAST-MINUTE PERMANENT NAME CHANGE of one of the characters throws itself in for good measure, and as usual, the new name sucks compared to the original name (Shasta/Cor, anyone? UGH.). I searched for about half an hour for a name-change trope that suited this, but I couldn't find one, surprisingly. If you locate it, let me know please!
Anyways. I'm not a big fan of High Fantasy because of all the tropes and cliches that are always around, but I still enjoy Marchetta's writing. Why? I honestly can't answer that for sure. But there's something about her writing that grips me, and I only hope that one day my own writing has that little piece of special magic that keeps the reader reading.
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