Good-Bye Pink Pig by C.S. Adler
My rating: 4/5 cats
MAY
as part of my personal reading challenges for 2017, once a month i will be revisiting a favorite book from when i was a little bitty karen and seeing if it holds up to my fond memories and determining if i can still enjoy it as an old and crotchety karen.
fingers crossed.
so: first things first. in answer to the question ‘does this book hold up?’, i think i gotta say “no.” this is the first book of the great 2017 MG reread project that i have liked less as an adult than i did when i was little. it still “holds up” in the sense that it’s a fine coming-of-age book and i wouldn’t discourage other people from reading it, but it does not hold up to my great shiny memory of it. whether that’s because life has been drained of pleasure for me now that i’ve lost my furry companion, or whether i’ve simply aged out of a book intended for ten-year-olds in the 80’s is unclear. but as an adult, i was pretty impatient with amanda and her relentless passivity and naiveté, and the shallow magic of her fantasy realm wasn’t enough to redeem the book for modern(ish) karen, who has been exposed to much stronger fantasy novels, even for younger readers. GR doesn’t have the technology to surface two distinct ratings attached to two different reads, so i am announcing here that this was once a five-star cat book, but the mean old grown-up karen is only giving it a four.
baby karen’s review:
i love this book and i want a collection of miniatures and a pig friend to sit in my hand and talk to me and i will name him wilbur.*
adult-karen review:
this project is teaching me that my sense-memory of books from the distant past being gentler or sugarcoating over uncomfortable realities in a way that contemporary, “edgier” YA books do not is completely wrong. because if there’s one thing this book has going for it, it’s that the details and complexities of its family dynamic are impressively handled. it’s not a horrorshow of trauma or anything, but the “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” idea applies here, and it’s chock-full of neglect, pressure, snobbery, disappointment, absence, general dysfunction, and straight-up criminal behavior. pretty much every human character (and at least one miniature) is casually shitty in their dealings with others, the way that people (and presumably miniatures) are. but if you had asked me before this rereading project began if young reader books from the 80’s were simplistically reductive in their presentation of good/bad, hero/villain, i would have said, “yup,” but that’s not the case here. there’s more texture to the characters than i remembered, which probably went unnoticed by me as a kid, reading this for the tiny little pig friend and without a million books in my rearview for comparison. but as an adult, it is noted and appreciated.
plot, character, complaints:
amanda is ten and very lonely. her father left her family shortly after she was born, and later died, depriving her of the chance to ever get to know him. her mother is always working, and all of her at-home attention is focused on amanda’s brother dale, whom she expects to get a scholarship to an ivy league school. dale has sports and schoolwork and friends to occupy his time, so amanda is mostly left alone. she has one close human friend, libby, and she has pink pig, a rose quartz miniature she received on her fifth birthday from an unknown benefactor, who regularly comes to life and transports amanda to a magical kingdom populated by the living manifestations of all the other birthday miniatures she has received over the years.
amanda is about to start middle school, where her paternal grandmother pearly works as a custodian (or “lady-janitor,” who inexplicably wears a dress to clean toilets and such) and acts as the self-appointed queen mum of the hallways—scolding and supporting and otherwise being attentive to all students, including the “can’t do that nowadays” grabbing of naughty students by their ears and dragging them to the principal’s office. amanda has never had a relationship with her because her snobby mother considers pearly to be “common,” and refused pearly’s assistance after amanda’s father left, cutting off all contact.
like most kids whose best friend is a talking rose quartz pig, amanda is very timid and solitary. her fear of encountering her grandmother at school causes her to fake illness for over a week and by the time she gets the balls to go to school, libby has been glommed-onto by the obnoxious new girl vera, who is made of unpleasantness, confidence, nosiness, and boy-craziness. she is liked by exactly no one, but neither libby nor amanda have the bad manners to ditch her, so they’re stuck with the pushy broad forever as she inserts herself into their mix, creating a barrier between amanda and her only non-porcine confidante.
amanda is as annoying a doormat as vera is a spoiled brat. once vera starts crushing on dale, she infiltrates amanda’s life, cozying up to her mother and brother (figuratively) while amanda hides out in her room, utterly displaced.
all of this is because amanda’s mom is the worst. she’s a single mother to two children, so money is definitely tight, even for an executive lady banker, but she’s got the entitled carriage of someone much wealthier, and she looks down her nose at pearly, on their “backwater” town, and on libby, who failed to meet her standards the only time she was allowed over because she had eaten with her mouth open, talked too much and used the wrong word about going to the bathroom. also, because libby’s family consists of eight children, an unemployed father, and a mother who is a potter, while amanda’s is all cool fashionable elegance—beautiful and ambitious, hungry for the good life and its trappings (she has a cloisonné collection, so lah-di-dah!), and she finds ways to be fancy even in her tiny home in the bad part of town:
”Where is that boy?” Mother said after a few minutes. “I was going to make a soufflé for his dinner, but it’ll be too late to start soon. This whole day has been nothing but one frustration after another.” She put the brush down. “Be a dear and bring me a glass of mineral water with a slice of lime in it. I’ll just lie down and relax with some chamber music till he comes.”
(nice use of “his” in that sentence, BTW)
she talks like a self-help book when trying to shape amanda into some WASP stereotype:
“Forming the right associations makes all the difference in life.”
and as she lectures a couple of ten-year-old girls about love in a way that no ten-year-old is going to find useful:
”A girl should never marry in her teens. It takes time to get rid of your romantic illusions and discover what’s really important in life.”
“What’s really important?” Vera asked, wide-eyed.
“Why, a person’s upbringing, their culture, their education.”
“Not how good-looking they are, you mean?” Vera said.
“Well, appearance matters, too,” Mother cautioned.
she’s not a great mom to amanda, because she can’t understand her, and the feeling is mutual
She had never been able to talk to Mother. It was hard to find the right words, and Mother was too impatient to listen very long, or if she seemed to be listening, she didn’t understand, and if she understood, she didn’t like what she heard.
but amanda’s no picnic, either. she’s so dumb. not only is it dumb of her to not figure out on her own where all those miniatures were coming from (yeah, i know she’s only ten, but it’s not like she’s got a wide social circle or a lot of unclaimed family loitering around. it’s either this or some stranger-danger about to toss her in his van, and the 80’s weren’t ready for that particular plot twist), but she’s regular-dumb, too:
Mr. Whittier looked annoyed at the message the eighth grader handed him. “Guidance wants you pronto, Amanda,” he said. “Ask them to introduce you to division with decimals since that’s what they’re making you miss this period.”
She looked at him wide-eyed. Did he really mean her to ask such a question?
this is why you have no friends, amanda. also—note to mr. whittier—this girl is a million times more in need of a therapist to address her cray than she is of division with decimals.
as to that cray, amanda has no filter and does not know how to read a room, so when her altworld piggy adventures in The Little World become known to dale and her mother, libby and vera, and all of them suspect she might have a touch of the crazy, running the reaction-spectrum from concern to mockery to therapist appointments to yelling, for the first time ever she’s got the confidence to stick to her beliefs and insists that pink pig is real, instead of learning the very important lesson that sometimes lying is the best option to avoid worrying those we love (or those we have to live with), even though libby’s a loyal friend.
”Do you think I’m crazy, Libby?”
Libby considered. “Even if you’re crazy, I like you a lot,” she said.
awww.
and honestly, for a girl who routinely goes into a fantasy world and talks to frogs and wizards, she’s pretty weak in the imagination-department:
”We’ve got a nice home and we know how to behave right. She’s given us a good enough start so we can go anywhere in life.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere special. Do you, Dale?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind being a big shot someday. Drive a fancy car and fly my own jet, maybe travel around the world and get written up in the paper. Yeah, I’d like that for sure.”
“When I grow up,” Amanda said, “I’m going to have my own kitten.”
“That’s all you want?”
“Well,” Amanda said. “Maybe a dog, too, and a swing in my own backyard, so I can watch the stars, and a tree so I can hear the leaves whisper.”
i guess for a girl who hangs out with a tiny pig, becoming a norm is a fantasy.
amanda is scared and weak and shy and socially awkward, but this is one of those coming-of-age books where a character transforms into a beautiful butterfly or whatever, leaving behind childish things for a couple of bunnies and some tedious girls. and maybe The Little World was real, maybe it was a childhood fantasy to outgrow, but let’s not go having too much hope for amanda’s future stability—as cool and composed as she is, amanda’s mother is just as delusional—both in her overestimation of her son, pushing a mediocre athlete and student into her ivy-league fantasy, heaping him with expectations he cannot attain, and also in her grand moneymaking scheme, which is…not cool, amanda’s mom, not cool at all. enjoy litchfield!
some things held up, though.
i still loved every description of pink pig coming to life, transforming from cold quartz to rubbery warmth with a wriggling nose and tiny little hooves. i SO wanted a little pet pig the size of a lima bean to bring to school every day after reading this as a kid and also now. i would never toss my friend in a pencil case, though, like cruel amanda does, because mine would be alive all the time. i have so many miniatures around here, or at leash tchotchkes, but none of them have come to life (yet). whenever you’re ready, guys!
i also still love this cover,
as soft-core lit and The Glass Menagerie-evoking as it is. two references 9-year-old karen would have zero context for, but just seeing it now makes me feel little karen banging on my skeleton from within asking me if we can have smurfberry crunch and banana-flavored pudding pops now. which we cannot, because the future is suck.
in any case, i’m definitely going to read the sequel to this, for the very first time. and maybe i will finally get a piggie of my very own.
if anyone has actually been following this project, here is the sad part when i explain that not only were there no bookplates or other childhood scrawls by me in this old book, but it didn’t even have a list of “other books” in the front for giggles at my childish record-keeping practices. another reason to dock a star, i think.
* not very imaginative, no, but amanda named hers “pink pig,” so it’s not like she was any paragon of naming stuff.
JANUARY: wait till helen comes
FEBRUARY: the little gymnast
MARCH: zucchini
APRIL: something queer at the library
JUNE: the girl with the silver eyes
JULY: the phantom tollbooth
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