Word: grownups
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What follows is an acute examination of amateur justice and its unintended results. If Friend suffers by comparison to History, it is in its familiar eccentric aunts and faded gentry, who infest Southern literature like kudzu. But Harriet is an original. While grownups like Michael Chabon are moonlighting as kids' writers, Tartt has written a grownup book that captures the dark, Lord of the Flies side of childhood and classic children's literature. Harriet is a child, not a pint-size adult or supergirl. (She's Harriet, not Harriet the Spy.) She is smart but not wise, naive...
...girls club (it's lowercase, so it's art!) says that feminism today is about both power and femininity. So does The Powerpuff Girls, but it's easier to walk the line between girl-positive feminism and silliness with little-girl superheroes than with grownup lawyers dressed like Britney Spears circa 1999. More problematic, girls club is so self-consciously about, y'know, women's stuff that almost every story defines the characters in terms of gender: Jeannie gets sexually harassed, Lynne is accused of infatuation with a male client, Sarah blurts out an anti-lesbian slur. Lest you miss...
...that low self-esteem can sometimes be fully justified. But maintaining a robust self-image while being able to absorb difficult criticism is surely worth the effort. It could lead to all sorts of strange occurrences: kids working harder, adults exercising self-control, thieves experiencing--yes--guilt, even grownup politicians taking full and painful responsibility for their actions and words. It's a pity that Torricelli still doesn't get it. But it's a deeply hopeful sign that the voters of New Jersey...
Kate has been called Bridget Jones five years later. But Kate is a grownup, sharp and observant yet wise and sentimental, something Bridget can never be. Feminists may hate the fact that Kate quits her job after deciding that you can't have it all. But, by the way, it's not male or female but merely childish to think otherwise. Pearson says she has sackfuls of mail from women who reject what they have seen in the boardroom. "Who wants to sit at ludicrous meetings in some testosterone jungle," Pearson asks, "and think of our children as problems...
...writing children's literature is that it offers so many chances for dialogue like that. (Just try to work that sentence into a romance novel.) Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is a novelist who can fashion an elegant grownup story as if it were a piece of soft aluminum. But the opportunity to plunge into the burdleburple of sheer fantasy is one reason he wrote Summerland (Hyperion/Miramax; 500 pages), the kind of book that features a motherly Sasquatch, some intrepid kids, numerous giants and "werefoxes," and several cliff-hanger...