Since finishing college I’ve spent a lot of time a) reading and b) applying for jobs. The job front had some positive movement over the past few days, and more positive movement this morning. However, on the reading front I’ve gone through John Zakour‘s The Flaxen Femme Fatale
First off, I ordered the book because several authors on a variety of blogs gave positive reviews of the book. Scott Westerfeld, author of Uglies, Pretties, and Specials, has this blurb on the back of the book:
“Artfully fractured and wickedly smart. A brilliant screwball comedy about love, self-knowledge, and the secret identities inside all of us.”
With that blurb out of the way, author Lauren McLaughlin writes a book about a 17 year old girl who, once a month for four days, coincidentally through her menstrual cycle, turns into a boy. The girl’s name is Jill, the boys name is Jack. The combination of Jack and Jill makes me wonder if the initial conceptualizing of the book was not more in answer to the question, “What if Jack and Jill were the same person?” However, in reading early author reviews and with the idea behind the book (e.g. what happens when a girl becomes a boy and how does she cope?) I was a little excited to read it. In my mind, the author would’ve meticlously looked into the psychology of boys, gotten some inside scoop on how 17 year old boys think and feel, talked to her husband and friends, run the book by men (especially the Jack chapters as the book is divided into Jack and Jill chapters) and then written something that, though not perfect, was a better approximation of what it means to be a girl that becomes a boy. To me, interesting in concept. However, disappointing in execution.
For starters, the book begins with Jill turning back into herself from Jack and the pain that is involved in that transformation. Incidentally, the book (pretty much) ends with the same transformation. However, once Jill becomes Jill again she goes through a meditative and self-hypnosis cycle to block out any of the memories that happened while she was in Jack form. This is an interesting conceit in the book, Jack knows all about Jill and uses it to his advantage, while Jill blocks out any knowledge Jack may have acquired and all of Jack’s memories and experiences. This is called Plan B.
Plan A, by the way, was to erase Jack altogether. Get rid of the transforming. And to move on as though Jill never became Jack. Plan B is Jill forgetting Jack for approximately 28 days and then locking herself into her room while in Jack form. On top of this, Jack is a pervert. What does that mean? Well, according to one of the conceits in the book, all men and boys look at porn. And in Jack’s case, he continually asks for porn, magazines and DVD’s to entertain himself while he remains reclusive in Jill’s room. However, what Jack has discovered, and as the inciting incident of the principal plotline, is that he is in love (or more accurately lust) with Jill’s best friend Ramie. Have to admit, I have no idea how to pronounce that name and here McLaughlin does what a lot of authors are encouraged not to do. She describes an attractive girl with an odd name and an odd personality and then expects her audience to believe that this person could be real. And here we find ourselves deviating from real into unreal. Well, the entire book sits in the realm of unreal and it is the author’s job to make sure it is grounded in enough reality to be believable. McLaughlin pretty much fails at every step.
Now, I can get behind the unlikely plot point of Jill becoming Jack. It is, after-all, one of the reasons I decided to buy the book. What I cannot get behind is a lot of other things. For starters, Ramie is unbelievable. The dialogue is awkward and doesn’t follow conventions of speach for teenagers. And, the gay-slash-straight meaning bi-sexual love interest of Jill’s, in the form of Tommy, isn’t a compassionate or believable character. On top of which, Daria, as a best friend and confidant, is introduced into the book as though we should trust she is already this and yet the reader never gets the sense that Daria is more than a foil meant to allow parts of the story to move forward and to offer comic relief (that wasn’t funny) at other points in the story.
Starting with Ramie. It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to know two things. First, teenagers don’t have the capacity for what teenagers do in most young adult novels, or in that spirit, in most movies, TV shows, or in anything that is meant to be popular media. Instead, teenagers are often adults of about 26 written as teeangers. As a result, you get teens with more ability than they should have, though that ability is only slightly outside of the realm of possibility. A teenager, a la Rorie Gilmore from Gilmore Girls fame, would be capable of writing a paper that a graduate student would envy complete with conclusions that graduate students aren’t in a position to draw, and that is believable, but only slightly so, because we want to believe that Rorie is someone who functions outside of her age group. In real life, she doesn’t exist. So, we deal with Ramie and she is one of those poeple who, somehow, functions outside of her age group. Secondly, Ramie is a dumb name. Where does it come from? How is it pronounced? And why did McLaughlin decide to go with a completely awkward name and then, on occasion, switch it up with the more familiar Rames? Makes me think that my initial decision that Ramie is pronounced with a soft “a” as in cat rather than a hard “a” as in hate and as a result every time I came across that name is confused me.
In short, Ramie is an awkward character that acts outside of what would be acceptable writing patterns for young adults in popular media and as a result remains unconvincing. Especially when Jill, as Jack, sneaks into her room and she allows it. At no point in the book has McLaughlin created a solid enough character to allow me, as a reader, to believe that Ramie is going to allow Jack into her room and then have sex with him. Every instinct tells me that Ramie is a fictional character, which makes sense since the book is fiction, and that she can’t be trusted when she speaks.
Next is the dialogue. For the most part dialogue is dialogue. People have a tendency to use it as a means of moving the story forward. As an aside, the book is told in the first person from Jill, and by extension Jack’s point of view. We don’t get to know what Ramie or Tommy or Daria think without having it filtered through Jill/Jack. More, the book is written as though this happened a few years ago and Jill/Jack is writing it as they remember it rather than it happening right now. As a result, I am not certain we can trust Jill/Jack as narrators and since we are expected to, I am also pretty certain that this is a drawback from the book. However, what McLaughlin does with this book is to create slang for her characters. Most noteably “mal” and “deeply”. My first problem is that I don’t know what I am supposed to derive “mal” from. Is it a derivative of malady, malaise, malevolent, or something else? As a result of my not understanding what is supposed to be meant by the use of the world, it comes across as awkward and difficult when I read it. With the outcome being that I was confused by it’s use. More, when “deeply” was thrown in as an adjective, it was actually easier to drop the word and read the sentence rather than trust that anyone actually speaks using deeply as a modifier in a sentence. It would’ve been easier, for me, to throw some other word in like, oh, I don’t know, “like”.
Sociologically, the word, “like,” is used among teenagers as a way of separating theselves from the event they are describing. This is pretty universal among English speaking teens. And as a result, when used in a conversation where the teen actively participated in something but wants to remain separate from it, the word, “like,” is the functional separator verbally. Teens also drop the word when they don’t want to separate themselves. All of this is a functional part of language and, when creating replacement words, have to follow similar rules to work. McLaughlin does not make this work.
The reason I shared Scott Westerfeld’s comment earlier is because he is the author of several books, many teen novels, specifically the Uglies series of books. This is a distopian future where his female teenage protagonist has enough knowledge and ability to assist the Smoke in taking on the establishment. As a result of that, he creates a slang dialogue for his characters and then has them use it as they converse. This dialogue was done correctly and followed appropriate patterns. The problem, though, may be that Westerfeld does not understand the rules of dialogue sufficiently to know when they are not being used appropriately. For him, this may be instinctual and if so, he does it well. McLaughlin, however, decided that her characters would not be typical teens with typical speaking patterns and attempted to created new patterns and failed in the process.
Now, it has become, let’s say . . . popular for author’s to write a book with a gay or homosexual leaning male character in it. Sometimes these are supporting charactes, at other times they are primary characters. In either case, the gay character, whether male or female, seems to be a neccessary role in books. What makes this interesting to me is that, like red heads, there aren’t enough gay or lesbian people, let alone teenagers, to account for the number of characters in books or to statistically support the idea that someone like Jill would even crush on someone like Tommy and then have Tommy be gay or bi or anything but heterosexual is, honestly, a statistical anomally. The truth of the matter is that Tommy, like Ramie, is not believable or real. People in their teens don’t due what Tommy does. As a result, Tommy as a bi- is not believable which means that either (as an author) McLaughlin is lying to her readers or Jill/Jack as narrator is lying. Since I don’t believe Jill/Jack and since the feeling of the book is “this all happened in the past” the outcome is quite literally that as narrator, Jill/Jack are not telling things as they really happened. What’s more, people aren’t strictly bi-. They lean in a specific direction. For Tommy to state that he doesn’t she men or women and only sees people doesn’t work either. Again, as a teenager, he wouldn’t think that way. His explanation would have to be different and since McLaughlin DID bother to find out what gay first encounters are like and then to write them very accurately, the idea that a 24 year old hitting on a teenager as a positive thing (entirely removing gender) is disgusting. We as a society do not allow relationships between adults and minors and have laws that protect the minor. The problem is that Tommy becomes unreliable as a character because of this experience and because this experience clouds all other experiences. The reader cannot trust that Tommy only sees people. This is further evidenced by Tommy telling Jill that he is a gay virgin but he’s had sex with girls. Can this change? Yes. McLaughin didn’t bother to finish telling her story under the misguided guise that she was creating a cliff-hanger. Honestly, there is nothing to hang off of since the story she was telling has nothing to do with the reason she left her audience hanging.
The problem with Daria is that the audience is never given enough about her to understand why she was included in the story other than to be a foil for the obnoxious things Jill and Ramie are doing. Daria is the reason the school knows Tommy is bisexual. Daria was the lookout when they decided to encounter Tommy on the ski slopes. Daria is an idiot and Daria doesn’t add anything to the story. And yet, Daria is (after the first quarter) everywhere.
Along with all of that, Jill’s dad, a successful lawyer, decides to practice meditation and, about the time Jill starts turning into a boy, disapears into the basement. Since it is through her dad that we find out that all men love porn, all men look at porn, and women should just get over the fact that men look at porn, one would think that Jill’s dad would have more of a role than Daria. In reality, he doesn’t. In general, someone doesn’t become a successful lawyer by being a wuss. And yet, this man is described this way. He is submissive to Jill’s mother and has been cowed into the basement, made into a fool, and not considered by anyone who matters as a viable individual who can do or accomplish anything.
Since pornography and sex are the two central themes of the book, and since this is a story meant for teenagers, and since we are meant to believe that this book is supposed to relate to teens, the outcome is that it is not a teen novel. McLaughlin would’ve done a better job had she just written an adult novel with gender swapping as the central theme. And at no time does her conclussions or assertions ring true in my ears or, for that matter, most other people’s. The outcome is that she is writing another book that I will never read. This one wasn’t worth it and she missed her target audience in so many ways I can’t believe RandomHouse published her. Missing the guy side is understandable, but her problem is bigge: she missed the girl side as well.
Utlimately, if you are looking for a well written but badly executed piece of Y/A fiction that misses its audience, this is the book for you. Otherwise, don’t waste your time. There is nothing to be gained in the book. And if you want a frank discussion on sex and pornography, go find Dr. Drew or watch MTV, you will get more out of it and it will probably be better geared for the intended age group. As for me, I am listing this book for sale and praying I don’t get caught up in author hype on another book like this again.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
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