Reading: Biographer's Tale

Moving: 30' Nordic Track, 3.12 miles

Listening: KBCO

Learning: what's happening with a former high school classmate

24 October 2000: Tuesday

Yesterday I actually used the Nordic Track when I got home. And I hung Granny's picture in my study. RDC commented on how well its blues coordinated with the Air Force blue of the walls and asked if that meant I wouldn't want to paint that room. Suuuuuure. And I did laundry. And swept. And ate of the roast stuffed chicken RDC made as a rehearsal for Thanksgiving. This is superior to how I spent Monday, which was falling asleep on the couch before 8:00. But this time, though my weekend tired me out, I didn't get sick. Yea!

Oh! Right. In the mail when we got home Sunday night was the new Cynthia Voigt. The third in the Bad Girls series, as I had expected from the title, It's Not Easy Being BAD. In Bad, Badder, Baddest, Voigt erred (in my opinion) by setting anything outside school, whose limited purview served her so well in the first, Bad Girls. Voigt doesn't mollycoddle the seventh grade experience. She writes of girls who had liked Mikey and Margalo in earlier books, in fifth and sixth grades, now giving them half-smiles that shouldn't be returned--friends being, in seventh grade, not people you like but people to be seen with. How true that was, in my experience. I don't know how long she can write about Mikey and Margalo. They're older now, and she's developed their characters well without betraying who they were before, but she stopped the Tillerman cycle when Dicey was grown and stopped the Kingdom series when the two lines of Gwyn and Burl were rejoined, but that's not the sort of obstacle her bad girls face. How will they be bad in peculiarly eighth grade ways, and only in eighth grade? Or in eleventh grade ways, still staying in school? She has such a fine touch with characterization; I do love Dicey, Gran, Jeff, and Mina; Jackaroo, Griff (but not Oriel), and Elske; Margalo and Mikey. She stopped writing about Dicey maybe when she had grown older than her audience or maybe when her story was complete (with a marriage? Nah. I prefer to think the former, too old for the main audience). On the Wings of the Falcon stumbled on and on and on and agh I was glad Voigt redeemed herself in Elske but I'm also glad she's not going to prolong the Kingdom story anymore. Mikey and Margalo will be young enough for at least several more grades, but will Voigt be able to manage?

Any why, anyway, didn't Sons from Afar work? Neither A Solitary Blue nor Come a Stranger nor The Runner featured Dicey as any more than a supporting character either, and they worked. I expected what Voigt must have thought (did she? because she and I are likethis), that James and Sammy had enough character to have a book to themselves. However, Madeleine L'Engle couldn't make this theory work for Dennys and Sandy in Many Waters either. Just because one set of twins is interesting (Bran and Matthew in A Swiftly Tilting Planet) doesn't mean another pair is.