Here is my Goodreads review (I promise my next book will be more substantial!):
it really, really frustrates me when books feel dated and therefore ineffectual.
originally published in 1982, [The Secret Window] needed some heavy lovin' for its latest printing in the 90s. but sadly here is no way that betty ren wright edited this book in 1991. i'm sorry, it's just not possible. at a very pivotal moment, the teen protagonist attends a boy-girl party and smells something sweet in the air. she, bewildered and upset, queries, "is that grass???"
no wonder this girl doesn't go to the cool kid parties more often.
look, i'm not into drugs and i am deeply opposed to our nation's youths partying like cast-offs from "dazed and confused" BUT if you are going to write about drug-addled teenagers, please, please, please get the slang right. i had this violent flashback to high school when i asked my father if i could go to a club with some of my friends. he said i could on the condition that if any of them were "smoking dope" that i needed to call him for a ride.
yeah, he lost me at "dope"...
of course, this is only a small part of the failings of this book. the protagonist meg is a mousy little do-gooder wrapped up in a bottle of precocious second sight. she has dreams, dreams that come true! her horrible friend gracie is constantly trying to be one of the "cool kids" but she stinks. she mocks her teacher and gets meggiepants in trouble. at the aforementioned boy-girl-grass .party, she freaks out thinking that meg blew the proverbial whistle and called the cops. she doesn't seem to realize that meg, for some inexplicable reason, refuses to get her friend in any kind of trouble at all.
even though she's AWFUL.
the end culminates predictably in meg using her gift to save her awful friend even though her friend barely acknowledges it and their friendship is severed forever by their lack of commonalities.
it's an okay book; betty ren wright is good at creating broken and dysfunctional families, but she writes them with such venom and anger that you feel like 1. either she herself is badly broken and angry or 2. she only writes in cartoon extremes.
which is a pity.
originally published in 1982, [The Secret Window] needed some heavy lovin' for its latest printing in the 90s. but sadly here is no way that betty ren wright edited this book in 1991. i'm sorry, it's just not possible. at a very pivotal moment, the teen protagonist attends a boy-girl party and smells something sweet in the air. she, bewildered and upset, queries, "is that grass???"
no wonder this girl doesn't go to the cool kid parties more often.
look, i'm not into drugs and i am deeply opposed to our nation's youths partying like cast-offs from "dazed and confused" BUT if you are going to write about drug-addled teenagers, please, please, please get the slang right. i had this violent flashback to high school when i asked my father if i could go to a club with some of my friends. he said i could on the condition that if any of them were "smoking dope" that i needed to call him for a ride.
yeah, he lost me at "dope"...
of course, this is only a small part of the failings of this book. the protagonist meg is a mousy little do-gooder wrapped up in a bottle of precocious second sight. she has dreams, dreams that come true! her horrible friend gracie is constantly trying to be one of the "cool kids" but she stinks. she mocks her teacher and gets meggiepants in trouble. at the aforementioned boy-girl-grass .party, she freaks out thinking that meg blew the proverbial whistle and called the cops. she doesn't seem to realize that meg, for some inexplicable reason, refuses to get her friend in any kind of trouble at all.
even though she's AWFUL.
the end culminates predictably in meg using her gift to save her awful friend even though her friend barely acknowledges it and their friendship is severed forever by their lack of commonalities.
it's an okay book; betty ren wright is good at creating broken and dysfunctional families, but she writes them with such venom and anger that you feel like 1. either she herself is badly broken and angry or 2. she only writes in cartoon extremes.
which is a pity.
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