At the request of Puck, I’ve set up an RSS feed. Also, I’d like to point out that fonts are available to download and the Old Stoneybrookite is available for viewing. So. On with the blog post.
As I mentioned yesterday, recently I took a trip to Borders and purchased many things, including Welcome to Camden Falls. Today I’m going to take the time to do a review of sorts.
image from Booksense.
First thing that really struck me was Flora and Ruby’s in case of emergency person: Annika Lindgren. Annika=name of Pippi’s best friend. Lindgren=last name of author who wrote the Pippi books. Cute, Ann. And like Mallory, Ruby is not allowed to wear glitter nail polish. Ann really likes glitter. She thinks it is so powerful that parents must ban it. Honestly, what’s the difference between a sparkly sweatshirt and a non-sparkly sweatshirt, or nail polish with glitter or nail polish without? It’s not like Mal wanted to wear a shirt that didn’t cover her stomach or with a naughty phrase emblazoned on it. She just wanted to reflect light.
The paragraph about how the Row Houses were a ~rainbow of different races~ made me want to puke. Main Street, while the target audience is 8-12 year olds, focuses on much more mature themes than the BSC books. Nikki’s dad is an alcoholic. Mrs. Willet’s Alzheimer’s is dealt with in more emotional depth than Uncle Joe’s was. Robby’s mental retardation is also shown with more depth than Whitney Cater’s. Yet I feel that the death of Flora and Ruby’s parents is dealt with oddly and the deaths of Abby and Mary Anne’s parents were done better. The death of Mrs. Winslow was done extremely well and so were Sunny’s emotions before and after her death. Flora and Ruby, on the other hand, do not demonstrate much emotion over the death of their parents. In five months they’ve managed to move on and have happy lives. While it’s good for them and all that, I don’t think it’s a realistic portrayal of elementary schoolers who were suddenly orphaned. Even when Flora found her mother’s diary her reaction was more “Here is something that connects me to Camden Falls” than “Here is something that connects me to her mother that will maybe give me insights into her and her life that I will never be able to ask her about myself because she was taken from me before I had the chance.” Maybe Ann knows something about the psychology of ten-year-olds that I don’t but I just think it’s weird.
The other unrealistic aspect of the book is Camden Falls itself. Ann says in the back of the book that she likes creating a very important setting for her books that become characters unto themselves. This is obvious from reading the BSC; Stoneybrook is definitely an integral part of the series. Camden Falls feels so idealized, and so fifty or sixty years ago, that it feels hard to believe. It has clearly defined independently-owned businesses that fulfill a specific purpose in town life and there is no overlapping. Stoneybrook at least had a national department store (Bellair’s) and all the houses in the Claudia side of town were basically identical. Ann says that Camden Falls is partially based on Woodstock, NY, and as I am coincidentally going to that area on Monday I will report back to y’all about whether or not this is Woodstock reality or weird fantasy. I would, however, like to see a Main Street where Wal*mart threatens to come to Camden Falls.
Overall I enjoyed it and will purchase the next book. It’s more interesting than I thought it would be.
