Cushman, Karen - The Ballad of Lucy Whipple
Mon, Jan. 24th, 2005 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterI picked this up on the strength of Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy. It's not quite as quirky or as funny as that book, but it's still good.
Lucy Whipple, formerly known as California Morning Whipple, has been dragged by her widowed mother across the country to dusty California, but all she can think of and long for is going back to Massachusetts.
Come to think of it, that's rather similar to my own life, except I never thought about it while I was reading it. Hrm.
The book is written in first-person POV, interspersed with Lucy's letters to her grandparents back east. While I like Lucy's voice, particularly her adoption of Western slang, I did find myself sort of missing Birdy's very distinctive diary voice. I think regular first-person POV may smooth out some of the more idiosyncratic bits about Lucy. I feel like I should have liked Lucy much more than I did -- I liked her, but I didn't quite adore her, despite the fact that she is bookish and also a displaced, moved-about person rather like me. Also, the relative familiarity of the era makes the book slightly less interesting to me. I know pretty much nothing about life during the Middle Ages, so I loved seeing little details of that in Birdy's diaries, but I have read a good deal of YA books about kids dragged out West by their parents and hating it, then finally learning to love it.
Anyhow, it was a fun read, just not smashingly brilliant.
Lucy Whipple, formerly known as California Morning Whipple, has been dragged by her widowed mother across the country to dusty California, but all she can think of and long for is going back to Massachusetts.
Come to think of it, that's rather similar to my own life, except I never thought about it while I was reading it. Hrm.
The book is written in first-person POV, interspersed with Lucy's letters to her grandparents back east. While I like Lucy's voice, particularly her adoption of Western slang, I did find myself sort of missing Birdy's very distinctive diary voice. I think regular first-person POV may smooth out some of the more idiosyncratic bits about Lucy. I feel like I should have liked Lucy much more than I did -- I liked her, but I didn't quite adore her, despite the fact that she is bookish and also a displaced, moved-about person rather like me. Also, the relative familiarity of the era makes the book slightly less interesting to me. I know pretty much nothing about life during the Middle Ages, so I loved seeing little details of that in Birdy's diaries, but I have read a good deal of YA books about kids dragged out West by their parents and hating it, then finally learning to love it.
Anyhow, it was a fun read, just not smashingly brilliant.