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The Royal We
May. 10th, 2015 06:27 pmThe Royal We
4/5. The Fug Girls do 'American exchange student falls in love with a British prince.'
I assumed, going in, that this would be a bubbly, young adult romp full of fashion porn and one-in-a-million romance. It is, in fact, a thoughtful adult novel containing very little fashion (our protagonist does not really care about clothes) which is perhaps more concerned with the relationship of two sisters than with all the boy-girl nonsense. It is also deft and pointed regarding the cost of fame. Not in the oh woe is me, it's so haaaard being rich and famous way, but of the sympathetic and awful, So now we find out which people we love are actually just using us way. I think the Fug Girls are peculiarly well-situated – and sufficiently thoughtful and self-aware – to get at that sort of thing.
I am supremely uninterested in talking about whether this book is Will/Kate RPF or not, and which incidents are true to life and which aren't. I just am so so so over having a version of that conversation, the exact same way I'm over talking about which young adult novels are fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. Like, for real, it is 2015. And yet we are all supposed to still be gatekeeping and classifying and arguing over how much transformative workness is good and how much is bad? Really? Color me un-fucking-interested.
It's a lovely book about family and England and love and friends and being young-and-fabulous and young-and-afraid and doing hard things and screwing up with everyone watching. It made some . . . choices . . . regarding mental illness that I'm still thinking about because I'm not sure I'm down with them, and you can still see some of the places where the authors apparently cut large amounts of material, but. It is what it is. And I liked it.
4/5. The Fug Girls do 'American exchange student falls in love with a British prince.'
I assumed, going in, that this would be a bubbly, young adult romp full of fashion porn and one-in-a-million romance. It is, in fact, a thoughtful adult novel containing very little fashion (our protagonist does not really care about clothes) which is perhaps more concerned with the relationship of two sisters than with all the boy-girl nonsense. It is also deft and pointed regarding the cost of fame. Not in the oh woe is me, it's so haaaard being rich and famous way, but of the sympathetic and awful, So now we find out which people we love are actually just using us way. I think the Fug Girls are peculiarly well-situated – and sufficiently thoughtful and self-aware – to get at that sort of thing.
I am supremely uninterested in talking about whether this book is Will/Kate RPF or not, and which incidents are true to life and which aren't. I just am so so so over having a version of that conversation, the exact same way I'm over talking about which young adult novels are fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. Like, for real, it is 2015. And yet we are all supposed to still be gatekeeping and classifying and arguing over how much transformative workness is good and how much is bad? Really? Color me un-fucking-interested.
It's a lovely book about family and England and love and friends and being young-and-fabulous and young-and-afraid and doing hard things and screwing up with everyone watching. It made some . . . choices . . . regarding mental illness that I'm still thinking about because I'm not sure I'm down with them, and you can still see some of the places where the authors apparently cut large amounts of material, but. It is what it is. And I liked it.