Johnson, Maureen - Girl at Sea

[oyceter]

Clio's just gotten the job of her dreams: working at an art store next to the cute guy she likes. Then her dad calls, and she has to quit before she's started to accompany him, his girlfriend, her daughter, a research assistant, and her dad's old friend on a boat trip along the coast of Italy.

This would be a cause of celebration to anyone except Clio, who's sick of her dad's harebrained schemes and how he constantly disrupts her life with them.

I suspect I may be the opposite of buymeaclue, as my reaction to this was largely "More relationship! Less boat!" I completely didn't buy Clio and Adrian's attraction to each other, especially since I thought Adrian was a total prat from the beginning. Clio also comes off as a total prat at times, but it was easier for me to like her because we're in her POV. Whereas Adrian just looked snotty.

I did like the prose and the strange way Clio has of looking at things (the beautiful Elsa as a dairy goddess, for example), and I very much like that Johnson made Clio and Elsa's friendship a very large part of the book. So, so far, she's two for two in terms of female friendships -- this book and Devilish both have elements involving female friendship that usually make me want to throw things, but Johnson pulls through both times and never downplays or deemphasizes the friendships.

Other than that.. I don't know. I was a bit put off by Clio's art background; any time an author starts talking about self-modified clothes and etc., I start to roll my eyes. This is not Johnson's fault; this is more my leftover teenage annoyance at all those people who were so cool and punk and counter-culture.

Also, I found the end to be very disconnected from the beginning. The book goes from quirky and funny father-daughter bonding with background bits of underwater mystery to Atlantis-type speculation and action movie finale! The bits from the past also didn't work for me -- possibly it was the change in prose style, but it also says something that I read the first chapter and thought it was a story Clio was writing, and that it was meant to be sort of bad and overwraught.

I sound much more down on the book than I actually am; I enjoyed Johnson's prose enough in this to keep reading her others (plus, I've heard good things about Golden Firebird and Bermudez Triangle), but I do hope that the next ones I read are a little less quirky and have much less action movie.

Comments

[gair.livejournal.com]

I liked Bermudez Triangle a lot (more on second reading than first, maybe because I was expecting something from it that it wasn't trying to do the first time round?), and will give this one a go on the accumulated goodwill from BT... (Hello, by the way. Got here via vassilissa, I think, and stayed mainly for the YA discussions, so here I am commenting. here's (http://gair.livejournal.com/tag/lesbian+teen+fiction) some posts I made on lesbian YA fiction, in case you want to investigate me...)

[oyceter]

Oh cool, pointers to more lesbian YA fiction, thanks! (Also, hi! Yay YA discussions!)

[sarahtales.livejournal.com]

At this point I have read all of Johnson's books and am waiting impatiently for Suite Scarlett, and have reached the level of interest where her prose is enough to make me supremely happy reading one of her books. That said, Aidan did initially annoy me and I really resisted the romance, but I ended up liking them for being prickly and messing up but being able to fix it with Elsa. Though I did wish we'd seen Clio being horrible to boys she liked - she was horrible to Aidan but he was fairly horrible first, and she seemed perfectly nice to the art shop chap, so I wasn't sure I bought it.

Still - mmm, prose. Supremely happy.

[oyceter]

Yeah, you're right... I didn't really buy Clio being horrible to boys she liked. I think while I like her prose a lot, her main characters tend to put me off a little, just because I suspect they wouldn't like me if they knew me in real life (or who knows, maybe they would, but I would be so scared of them I would never talk to them!). Er, this all based off of just this book and Devilish.