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Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones
Jun. 19th, 2021 07:42 pmArcher's Goon
3/5. The one about Howard, whose father is supposed to produce 2,000 words every quarter for a mysterious personage, or else, and the or else gets his family entangled in a set of seven mysterious alien siblings controlling the town.
This is a weird one. It's making a subtle but strange point about the difference between unpleasant people who are sympathetic and interesting, and unpleasant people who are not. The difference being self-awareness. Howard knows he has the potential to be a twit, and he definitely sees the dark road his sister* (named Awful, just in case you missed it) could go down. But his father is a raging twit and has no idea, and is rendered insufferable thereby. That's some complex stuff for a kid's book, which is typical DWJ. But it's not all that much fun to read about.
*I gloss her as genderqueer, btw. You can make a pretty good case for it in the text, though it's clearly not what DWJ actually intended.
3/5. The one about Howard, whose father is supposed to produce 2,000 words every quarter for a mysterious personage, or else, and the or else gets his family entangled in a set of seven mysterious alien siblings controlling the town.
This is a weird one. It's making a subtle but strange point about the difference between unpleasant people who are sympathetic and interesting, and unpleasant people who are not. The difference being self-awareness. Howard knows he has the potential to be a twit, and he definitely sees the dark road his sister* (named Awful, just in case you missed it) could go down. But his father is a raging twit and has no idea, and is rendered insufferable thereby. That's some complex stuff for a kid's book, which is typical DWJ. But it's not all that much fun to read about.
*I gloss her as genderqueer, btw. You can make a pretty good case for it in the text, though it's clearly not what DWJ actually intended.