Outside Beauty by Cynthia Kadohata
My rating: 3/5 cats
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!!
as i review yet another book about spectacularly irresponsible parenting!! like Lullabies for Little Criminals, these four girls grow up with a parent blissfully ignoring their parental responsibilities in order to live in some sort of hedonistic wonderland. in lullabies, the relationship was drug-addled romping, where the two of them behaved like children together until it all came tumbling down. this book is less dangerous than that, but helen kimura isn’t going to win any parenting awards…
she is like a less vengeful miss havisham, training her girls to be sex-bombs to be able to live a life of leisure and not have to have a job and still get expensive jewelry, but she isn’t plotting anyone’s destruction, she’s just teaching her girls how to be perfect and beautiful; so they will be successful in life. awesome. did i mention that she has four daughters by four different men?? now, i’m not saying she is LGM or anything, this is only important as a plot point, because they are all feverishly devoted to one another in their little estrogen-hive, until SOMETHING HAPPENS, and they get scattered to the winds, each having to go to her own father’s house, and how this affects their close-knittedness and their understanding of the broader world.
there are a number of reasons i don’t have kids. and one of these reasons is that i don’t do anything half-assed. and if i was going to have a kid, i would be, you know, involved in its life, to raise it into a courteous and useful human. and frankly, i don’t have time for that.
but it doesn’t stop other people from breeding.
yesterday at work—in the bookstore—we had a concert from noon (jasmine says 9) to 7 of young precocious children and their violins and pianos and shit. the music part was fine, but when each child finished its performance (and please do that math—seven ten hours of performances equals a shit-ton of kids) they were just let loose onto the floor, like some musical catch-and-release program, unsupervised, running and yelling and throwing themselves under tables and laying down in front of shelves, not caring about being respectful towards the music of their peers. i saw two little boys, about seven years old, carrying a very expensive photography book of nudes between the two of them, like in one of those cartoons where people carry panes of glass out in public and you just know it is going to end badly, running and grinning about the chance to look at illicit boobies in public like a couple of old perverts and barreling into customers with this very expensive book (oh, yes, the store remained open throughout this debacle) and where were the parents?? of any of ’em?? no one knows. we took turns yelling at other people’s kids all day. and i don’t get hazard pay for this kinda day—they just expect me to do my job on top of everything else. is hard to be me.
so on this mother’s day, don’t be a junkie and think that being a best friend is the same as being a parent. don’t pick up hitchhikers when you have a car full of your daughters and you are running away from your latest insane boyfriend, don’t think that just ‘cuz your kid can play a sonata or two that they know how to behave themselves during a bookstore-concert.
make me some better adults, please.
read my book reviews on goodreads
