How to use this Page

I picked up A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller as a sort of return to my teen reading when I was into historical fiction. Mad, Wicked Folly was a bit of a roller coaster experience in which I went "I'm loving this," "No, it's a torn-between lovers scenario," "Wait, something different is going on here," "Yes, I love the art stuff."

Vicky is the child of upper middle class parents in 19 ought England. These are rigid folks who have specific expectations of their daughters. Vicky, however, has a talent for art and a willingness to study it. I loved the art aspect of this book. I don't have any desire to create art, myself, my interest is in its historical and cultural aspects. I loved all that in this book. I knew nothing about the pre-Raphaelites. Now I'm beginning to know something about them.

Vicky also becomes involved with the suffragist movement in England. Loved that, too. Waller uses the term "suffragette" instead of "suffragist," which always annoys me because I learned that the "ette"ending is derogatory. However, in her end notes she explains the suffragist/suffragette issue, definitely to my satisfaction.

The torn-between-two-lovers thing, which was a little predictable to this experienced reader, was far more palatable to me because of the great art and feminist world that it existed in.The teenage Gail who read historical romances would have been far more appreciative.

Reading this book made me realize that there is a way to get me to read romance. Have some really good content of another nature in the book.

Add a Comment

I've had mixed feelings about the Tim Wynne-Jones books I've read to date. Loved one. Didn't love one. And one seems to have been just okay for me, dude.

But I feel as if he wrote Rex Zero and the End of the World just for me.

Ottawa, the city that young Rex Norton-Norton moves to with his British-eccentric family, is the only Canadian city I really know much about. When Rex rides his bike, Diablo, around the city, I can recognize the references to the Rideau Canal (I biked along it in Ottawa just last fall), and I even know who Diefenbaker was. The French used by the damaged World War I vet in the book is just about at my reading level. I only had to use my French-English dictionary once.

But Rex Zero and the End of the World has a sense of place in time as well as geography. It's set in the early 1960s during the cold war, and the kids in this story are just plain scared. And what they're scared of is the bomb. Some of their parents are building personal air raid shelters, or, as members of government (Ottawa is the capitol of Canada, remember) eligible to head out to the not-so-secret Diefenbunker to sit out the radiation expected after a nuclear attack that the kids expect will turn anyone not protected into mutants.

Rex's parents are pillars of common sense, but his older sisters are just plain brilliant at collecting misinformation. When one of them comes home with a story she's heard about the cosmonauts who are then circling the globe being able to spy on them, to actually look into their bedrooms, Rex's father says, "Nonsense." His mother, perhaps even more practically, advises them to keep their curtains closed.

Rex, new to the city, finally falls in with a group of friends who have something more to fear. They are certain that a panther that had escaped from the Granby Zoo has made its way into Ottawa.

If you could choose between being afraid of a panther that might tear you apart and being afraid of a bomb that might turn you into a mutant, should you survive it, which way would you go?

Believe it or not, though, this is a funny book. At the same time that you're feeling for these kids because they are living in fear, you're laughing at the things they do and say.

My only quibble is that I think Rex made a little too much of an intuitive leap in solving the panther problem. And, okay, maybe the beatnik was too obviously a device to get information out about the WWI veteran. But when a book is enjoyable and interesting, we can shrug off a couple of quibbles, can't we?

I've read a couple of reviews that suggested there was too much period detail in this book. No more than The Wednesday Wars, I'd say, which was also a 60s book published last year. Rex Zero, though, has a much more coherent storyline and doesn't try to improve us with anything remotely like Shakespeare.

Rex Zero has just come back this month with Rex Zero, King of Nothing

Add a Comment

by Miss Erin

A month FULL
of jokes and silly laughter
of new friends and cohorts
of AMAZING AUTHORS,
talking to us
- us! -
and lending inspiration
Inspiration to write
and read (even more than I already do)
A place, like a holdfast
each night that we come to
to party and learn
This is readergirlz
This is 31 Flavorites
This is bliss


Tonight's chat (5PM Pacific/8PM Eastern) is with Kirsten Miller, author of Kiki Strike! JOIN US!

Display Comments Add a Comment