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Missing Sisters by Gregory Maguire
Sep. 24th, 2006 01:10 pmThis book is about two young girls in 1960’s New York. Alice has a hearing loss and a speech impediment, and she lives in a Catholic home for orphans. Miami has been adopted into a crowded but happy home. Neither of them know about the other, and this book is about them finding each other again.
Oh, man. My faith in YA lit and Gregory Maguire are equally restored. I’ve found the first recently rather dull, and the second frustratingly unwilling to pull his endings through.
This is a book for young readers in which the adults are lively and funny and compassionate, doing their best with the world as it is. It’s a book about faith that didn’t make me wince – faith in the literal way of children, and the resigned but sincere way of adults. It’s a book about miracles, of all things, and I liked it.
Mostly, I think, it’s because the book purposely contravenes standard YA lit tropes. The story does not go at all the way you think it will when Alice and Miami find each other. There’s no sudden and unexpected construction of a traditional family, no matter what flashy tricks the girls try with news reporters. The story is about how happiness doesn’t take the big miracle, the flash and the bang and the wild chance, it just takes getting up in the morning. It’s about how life doesn’t have to be like a young adult novel to still be pretty good.
Unrelatedly, Maguire really does have a delicate touch with his marginalized protagonists. He writes about people who have fallen between the cracks, who are marked, and he likes to have it written on the body through disability (here) or green skin (a metaphor which flickers between race and disability in Wicked) or beauty itself (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister). He does this with grace and grittiness, so the marks are catalyst and reaction and product all at once. Which makes them very real.
Oh, man. My faith in YA lit and Gregory Maguire are equally restored. I’ve found the first recently rather dull, and the second frustratingly unwilling to pull his endings through.
This is a book for young readers in which the adults are lively and funny and compassionate, doing their best with the world as it is. It’s a book about faith that didn’t make me wince – faith in the literal way of children, and the resigned but sincere way of adults. It’s a book about miracles, of all things, and I liked it.
Mostly, I think, it’s because the book purposely contravenes standard YA lit tropes. The story does not go at all the way you think it will when Alice and Miami find each other. There’s no sudden and unexpected construction of a traditional family, no matter what flashy tricks the girls try with news reporters. The story is about how happiness doesn’t take the big miracle, the flash and the bang and the wild chance, it just takes getting up in the morning. It’s about how life doesn’t have to be like a young adult novel to still be pretty good.
Unrelatedly, Maguire really does have a delicate touch with his marginalized protagonists. He writes about people who have fallen between the cracks, who are marked, and he likes to have it written on the body through disability (here) or green skin (a metaphor which flickers between race and disability in Wicked) or beauty itself (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister). He does this with grace and grittiness, so the marks are catalyst and reaction and product all at once. Which makes them very real.
