InsaneJournal

So I ran into the damndest thing in the world yesterday: A YA book that didn't blow. I also kinda crushed the entire thing in a few hours before realizing (at about 3am) that I needed to sleep.

Cecilia Galante's The Patron Saint of Butterflies was actually a decent read. The story is basically this: Two teenage girls have been growing up in a religious commune. The one, Agnes, is obsessed with becoming spiritually perfect & eventually becoming a saint. The other, Honey, is a bit of a rebel/outcast, knows there's something wrong with the way things are going there, and wants the hell out. Agnes's grandmother turns up to visit, finds out that the kids are severely beaten & humiliated for misdeeds on a regular basis, and basically says "Fuck this, we're getting you all out of here."

What follows is approximately four days' worth of a shaking-down of faith and some added hardcore culture shock, as the girls (+ Agnes's little brother) are brought into a technologically advanced society and as everyone tries to gradually get Agnes deprogrammed. But with regards to how Agnes is half a breath away from flagellating herself in penance for imagined sins & how she's desperate to re-immerse herself in the commune, its toxicity being the only thing she's ever known, "gradual" isn't gonna cut it.


Now: Is this book gonna get a lot of attention by making waves in the religious community like Philip Pullman's HDM trilogy? No. It's pretty clear in stating that cults and forced isolation from the world are bad but the Judeo-Christian tradition isn't, especially in relation to a scene involving a Southern Baptist service. But this may overall be a bad thing, because while the book showed the girls' emotions and reasoning pretty clearly (without making them wangsty, too!) it didn't really make any waves. Cults are bad, yes, we know this. Beating the bleeding hell out of a kid for being a kid is bad, we know this. Putting anyone's life at risk by denying them a doctor in favor of a potential "miracle healing" is all kinds of bad, yes. But it doesn't really tell us anything new or push any barriers, and for that I doubt it'll stick around for as long as it could.



So yeah. Pros: Understandable, recognizable, not perfect but likable, non-wangsty characters. Problems don't magically go away. Forward momentum. Lack of the most-overdone feared version of "Luke I am Your Father" (though it does poke that trope in a different, foreshadowed format). A touching-upon of how the stories of someone's greatness don't necessarily tell the whole truth or focus on that person's humanity, with the juxtaposition of Agnes's revered saint stories (and family members delving deeper, asking how the about-to-be-martyred person must've felt) and the tales of the cult leader's miraculous greatness versus his "miracle healing"/severe FUBAR of Agnes's little brother's crushed hand & severed fingers. Also, it's clean: there's a little bit of language but barely a breath in the direction of sex, so I can recommend this to the librarian who comes through all the time.


Cons: Some dialog doesn't sound natural and there's a few minor typos. Honey's thought process tends to skitter like a spider in a hot frying pan (this seems to be part of her characterization), and a big dark bruise on her cheek on p. 16 is gone (or at least no longer mentioned) by the time Agnes's grandmother sees her a few hours later. There's also some pretty transparent foreshadowing--but for the YA section, that's damned near phenomenal.

ETA: I just did some reading up on the FLDS and realized how much this story echoes the story of the two Fawns--both of which fled the cult they'd grown up in and one of which returned.

. . . I went looking for that Luke I Am Your Father link and just spent the past hour trolling about tvtropes.org. That site's like internet crack! D:




ETA: Of course, I had to go ruin the post-good-book feeling by cracking open the Clique tie-in book Massie. That piece of shit features an unrepentantly shallow twat of a main character who gleefully spends the novel making money (stereotypically) selling ridiculous amounts of cosmetics to tween & teen girls--of course, by making them feel like shit about themselves & turning them into consumer whores. And I mean blatantly making them feel like shit about themselves--at one point she drops a line like "You need to use this kind of moisturizer, and that's why people call you this behind your back!" Followed promptly by the character thinking about how helping the "less fortunate" made her feel good.

Me, I wanna know why none of the girls she trampled over didn't promptly beat the shit out of her. If someone tried to talk me into a makeover by insulting everything about me, telling me that "everyone" was talking shit about me behind my back, and insisting I had to stop having fun so I could "look like a girl," I'd give them a fucking icepick lobotomy with their eyeliner pencil.