Monday, March 18, 2013

Girly Boy Humor With Literary References

For the first time, I read a Louise Rennison book that I felt was pretty much like the one I read before. I suspect her Georgia Nicholson books are a lot alike, but I happened to read them far enough apart that I didn't care. With A Midsummer Tights Dream, I felt that it really was pretty much Withering Tights.

Of course, that's not going to be a bad thing for many young readers.

I still think these Tallulah Casey books have a little more depth than the Georgia Nicholson books. There's the parody of artistic types, for one thing. It's the same parody from the first book, but, still, good stuff. Plus there is the casual acceptance that young people read classics and make jokes with literary references. (Yeah. Maybe in England.) And, by the end of the book, I was feeling a little compassion for poor Lulahloo's experiences with good boys and bad. There is a sort of mystery of life that she's trying to solve, pretty much by herself.

Here's something I found to be a hoot. I've been reading How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, and while reading A Midsummer Tights Dream, I thought, Why, with all her talk of corkers and snogging (though while not necessarily using those words) Caitlin Moran sounds for all the world like a Louise Rennison protagonist. Louise Rennison may have created Caitlin Moran.


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