A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer
306 pages
Published 1996
Read from June 2 to June 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Skipping as I did directly from little kid books to the staple family-friendly classics like Tom Sawyer and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
I missed out on most of the usual "young reader" fare. Whenever I visit
the bookstore or the library nowadays, I'm amused by the ubiquity of
"dead dog" books on the tween shelves. To be fair, I only assume
that any time a faithful dog appears in the title of a story or
prominently on the cover, the dog isn't long for this world; it's an
easy (too easy) way to give younger readers an emotional hit they are
sure to relate to, though to me it seems like publishers and authors tend to underestimate their audience there. Similarly ubiquitous are the "12 year old survives on
their own in the wild for a year" novels. Unlike dead dog books, I like
these, or at least I like the idea of them. Reading them as an adult
seems to be a case of diminishing returns, though.
A Girl Named Disaster distinguishes itself from the likes of Julie of the Wolves
by devoting over a third of its length to the family drama and cultural
circumstances that drove Disaster to leave home and that greeted her on
her return from the wild. Most unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying
the culture and drama sections far more than the survival portion in the
middle. There are only so many ways to describe making traps and
finding berries, and setting the action in East Africa rather than the
Catskills or the North Slope only makes it so interesting. Honestly, it kind of dragged. Family drama,
though -- when done well, that's the rootstock of good fiction. I must be getting old.
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