![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
After Hamelin, by Bill Richardson
May. 28th, 2020 06:52 pmTime to return to another childhood read! This book came out when I was approximately middle-school-aged, and was much talked about at that time. It was the sort of book that was aimed at children but which adults really approved of you reading, but also it was a fairy tale retelling so I actually read it. It won the Silver Birch Award, and I was encouraged to read a lot of Silver Birch and Red Maple nominees in school. (I didn't actually read many of them though, I mostly was unimpressed with the selection.)
After Hamelin is a retelling of the story of the Pied Piper, from the perspective of the one child who was left behind, and how she goes on a quest to save all the other children of Hamelin. And rereading it as an adult, with a finer tuned understanding of genre conventions, this book is 100% in the Literary Fiction genre.
I'm conflicted, a bit, in how I feel about it. I love the elderly Penelope's perspective (elderly Penelope's a delight!) and I love all the skipping rhymes. This might be one of the few books aimed at children that includes rhymes where the rhymes add to the experience of reading rather than detracting. And I really like that two of the big things that save the day are harp-making and jumping rope, neither of which are traditionally heroic skills.
But the ~literature~ aspects of the book are not really my thing, and I don't find the ending satisfying -- which, honestly, it's a very ~literature~ ending so maybe that's not surprising. And all the dreamworld stuff doesn't really do it for me, which is a problem in a book that is largely set in the dreamworld. None of her companions while she's there feel particularly real to me. Which perhaps makes sense for a dreamworld! But it means that for the majority of the book it's only Penelope carrying the whole thing for me, and young Penelope doesn't have the same force of personality as old Penelope.
Also, from a disability-representation perspective: I'm glad that Penelope doesn't get cured of her deafness and stays deaf her entire teenaged and adult life. BUT. She spends the whole time she's in the dreamworld (i.e. much of the length of the book) not being deaf, which I feel is a cop-out in terms of actively portraying a disabled character.....
So I don't know. I have a lot of nostalgic fondness for this book, and there's some stuff it does that I really do like, but I'm not sure how the balance comes out in the end between the stuff I like and the stuff I don't!
On another note, I googled the author when I was partway into this reread, and found myself fascinated. All I knew about him from when I read this book as a kid was that he was a famous radio person. Well, he is that, and also he once was a children's librarian, and also he's written a bunch of other books which all seem to be wildly different from each other, and also he is apparently currently working on a musical called "do you want what I have got? a Craigslist Cantata". A man of many interests!
After Hamelin is a retelling of the story of the Pied Piper, from the perspective of the one child who was left behind, and how she goes on a quest to save all the other children of Hamelin. And rereading it as an adult, with a finer tuned understanding of genre conventions, this book is 100% in the Literary Fiction genre.
I'm conflicted, a bit, in how I feel about it. I love the elderly Penelope's perspective (elderly Penelope's a delight!) and I love all the skipping rhymes. This might be one of the few books aimed at children that includes rhymes where the rhymes add to the experience of reading rather than detracting. And I really like that two of the big things that save the day are harp-making and jumping rope, neither of which are traditionally heroic skills.
But the ~literature~ aspects of the book are not really my thing, and I don't find the ending satisfying -- which, honestly, it's a very ~literature~ ending so maybe that's not surprising. And all the dreamworld stuff doesn't really do it for me, which is a problem in a book that is largely set in the dreamworld. None of her companions while she's there feel particularly real to me. Which perhaps makes sense for a dreamworld! But it means that for the majority of the book it's only Penelope carrying the whole thing for me, and young Penelope doesn't have the same force of personality as old Penelope.
Also, from a disability-representation perspective: I'm glad that Penelope doesn't get cured of her deafness and stays deaf her entire teenaged and adult life. BUT. She spends the whole time she's in the dreamworld (i.e. much of the length of the book) not being deaf, which I feel is a cop-out in terms of actively portraying a disabled character.....
So I don't know. I have a lot of nostalgic fondness for this book, and there's some stuff it does that I really do like, but I'm not sure how the balance comes out in the end between the stuff I like and the stuff I don't!
On another note, I googled the author when I was partway into this reread, and found myself fascinated. All I knew about him from when I read this book as a kid was that he was a famous radio person. Well, he is that, and also he once was a children's librarian, and also he's written a bunch of other books which all seem to be wildly different from each other, and also he is apparently currently working on a musical called "do you want what I have got? a Craigslist Cantata". A man of many interests!
