The Little Woods by McCormick Templeman
My rating: 4/5 cats
yeah, i just had fun reading this book.
there are a lot of two-star reviews of this book on here, and while i find myself agreeing with a lot of the criticisms of the book: the fact that is doesn’t hide its secrets well, the baffling but obligatory love triangle(s), the uneven delivery of the two mystery-plots, the emphasis on the beautiful beautiful people…i don’t know—it was just a really fun and fast read, and i freaking loved cally.
and it is not because she is punk rock in a sea of rich (and, yes, beautiful) kids, but because she is coming out of a background of damage (you can read the book-synopsis—i don’t feel like writing a book report right now, just my response to it—sorry), and seems to be forming a really interesting personality as a result. yes, she is lazy, squandering her academic gifts, but she isn’t throwing herself into the oblivion of drinking and drugs and sex. she dabbles a little, in a way that is calculating and fascinating, the same way she dabbles into forming relationships with these beautiful, and foreign to her experience, kinds of people. she is just sniffing around, testing the waters.
reviewers say that cally and alex as a couple makes no sense. and they don’t. but it makes sense, to me, in remembering my own teen “relationships.” sometimes we just want something beautiful to walk next to us. high school relationships, i mean, they weren’t always intense, you know? you see someone, and you think “phoar—hot” and you go and talk to it. and it’s completely superficial and you have nothing in common, but you like to be attached to something pretty. so that didn’t bother me so much. and then when jack entered the picture, it was all-out teen hormones and no regrets. View Spoiler »
the mystery…yeah, we all saw it coming. but cally didn’t. and her discovery of it, with all of the red herrings and misjudgments still served a purpose. i think the story was less about the payoff of the mystery itself and more about her as a character. i think this is frequently the case in boarding-school narratives. they are about the “other,” the “stranger” being placed in a setting where it is like an old-timey small-town setting where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and the new arrival has to catch up to what everyone else takes for granted, find their own place within this setting, and then either acclimate or reject it.
and cally alternates between the two. she’s a punk/goth kid who isn’t trying to be edgy, she is just unselfconsciously lazy about her appearance and she eats like a crazy stoned hummingbird. you had better believe i am going out to buy a box of cheerios and seeing what they taste like covered in honey. and she doesn’t try to be something she’s not, but she does try to see how the other half lives, which i think feels realistic. and she’s clever. i like her occasional vocabulary-flourishes. they were never overdone to the point of annoying me, which can happen with overly-articulate YA characters. she just seemed clever, and i liked her banter.
this was just a quick little read, and i think if you don’t go into it thinking it is going to be a thrilling mystery novel, you will like it. as a boarding-school character study, i think it is very successful, and maybe i just misplaced my critical faculties when i was reading it, but i enjoyed it more than the book i had forgotten at home, which was why i had to borrow this book from work in the first place. i guess everything happens for a reason, yeah?
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