Chloe and the Lion

 
Chloe and the Lion

by Mac Barnett

art by Adam Rex

Disney Hyperion

2012
 

 

My coworker who's interested in children's lit is taking a class on it this semester, so her desk is pretty much covered in kids' books and she has a new suggestion any time you ask. Her latest pick for me is Chloe and the Lion by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Adam Rex, and I have to say it's good choice for me, because I generally love the kind of metafictional gimmicks that are being deployed here. I eat this kind of thing right up.
 
I don't know the name for the exact metafictional device at work here, when a work of fiction stars what is supposedly its own author as a character, when the lead character of the work is depicted as acting out the story simply as a performance, as a job like any other. The most famous example is probably the play Six Characters in Search of an Author, although it's a device I know best from the Looney Tune "Duck Amuck", where Daffy Duck is tormented by an off-screen animator who keeps redrawing the cartoon around him, supposedly forcing Daffy to improvise his performance in response to the changing costumes and scenery.
 
Chloe and the Lion stars the character Chloe, of course, and a lion, but it also stars author Mac Barnett and artist Adam Rex. Actual Rex depicts 'Adam' and 'Mac' as detailed and relatively realistic clay figures, like you'd see in stop-motion animation, and shows them in a miniature theater with stage backdrops providing the scenery. I think these are photos of actual miniatures. As wholly fictional characters, Chloe and the lion are depicted as 2D drawings, playing their parts on-stage in response to Mac's narration. The mix of art syles is visually impressive and elevates the whole endeavor.
 
We never do get very far into the supposed story because of a clash of personalities between Adam and Mac very quickly derails the intended plot. Chloe collects coins and saves them up to ride the carousel, except one day she gets lost in the woods and meets ... well, she's supposed to meet a lion, but instead Adam draws a dragon because he thinks that looks cooler! Adam and Mac argue, and after several pages of disagreement, Adam gets fed to the lion and Mac takes over drawing the illustrations himself. They are comically bad and amateurish.
 
Eventually Chloe and the lion intervene, because Chloe wants the story to continue and the lion wants to be drawn in a less embarrassing-looking way. Ultimately, Adam and Mac make up and become friends again, and Chloe gets to ride the carousel again. It's a happy ending, and a lot of fun getting there!
 
When I was a teen, I read the novel The Princess Bride by William Goldman, the one the film is based off of. In the movie adaptation, there's a bit of metafiction in that the whole story is being told as a bedtime story by a grandfather to his grandson. But the book is quite a bit more experimental. Goldman claims to be merely an editor for the 'real author' S Morgenstern, and the book itself claims to be a much abridged 'good parts' edition, with lots of footnote comments by Goldman explaining what he cut out. As a teen, I wasn't really able to understand that there was no Morgenstern, no prior, more complete version of the same story. I didn't understand that what I was holding was the real and only version of the book, that all the supposed comments and edits were actually part of the story. It was something I realized only later, when I had a little more experience with literary artifice and more time to think about it 
 
In the case of Chloe and the Lion, the artifice is more obvious, and probably young readers will have a parent or someone around to act as a sounding board if they need to talk their way through what they're seeing to fully understand it. It's a fun introduction to a literary device they'll likely see again, one that plays with the boundary between fact and fiction and shows off some of what's possible in art.

McSweeney's 13

 
 
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern 13
An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c
edited by Chris Ware

McSweeney's

2004 
 
 
When I first started reading The Best American Comics, the series editor mentioned a couple inspirations for the project, and on was Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, number 13, spring 2004, An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c, known more simply as the McSweeney's comics issue. Edited by Chris Ware, the comics issue is a mix of comics and short articles about comics. 
 
The featured artists include a lot of names I recognize as recurring contributors to BAC. The comics themselves frequently seemed like Ware was picking things that resembled his own work - lots of very small panels with miniature text totally filling the page. I sometimes wished for a magnifying glass while reading this one. In addition to the hardcover 'magazine' itself, Ware drew what looks like a newspaper comics page, this is folded to create a dust jacket, the same way I used to fold brown paper grocery bags to make book covers for my textbooks in school. The folds create two pockets, which have a couple of tiny bonus zines in them.
 
Among the essays, there's an example of an early illustrated pamphlet (a precursor to modern comics) about a man repeatedly trying and failing to commit suicide, which then became a common motif for humorous illustrations, there's some preliminary Peanuts sketches and unpublished Krazy Kat strips (along with discussion of Charles Schultz's and George Herriman's art styles), there are personal essays by John Updike and Chip Kidd about the importance of comics to them, and someone else wrote a brief history of the time a teenage Michael Chabon made amateur comics with a couple friends.
 
Beyond the foldout cover and an introductory essay, Ware also includes a sample of what would eventually become Building Stories. Ware gives us an excerpt from Charles Burns' Black Hole, a bit of the very recent In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman about 9/11, and an excerpt from Joe Sacco's graphic journalism on the Bosnian War. I had a strong sense reading this that the comic scene Ware was canonizing was rooted in the 1990s. (Which in turn makes me wonder about how the BAC series continued to amplify so many of the same artists.)
 
Other graphic nonfiction includes a Lydia Barry comic about losing and then rediscovering the joy of creation, and a number of graphic diaries, often about unrequited love and other forms of sexual anxiety. Among the fiction strips, we get usual suspects like Robert Crumb, Jim Woodring, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, and Ben Katchor, who I've become quite fond of via anthologies. 
 
This is a cool artifact, and I probably still want to read more from a few of these artists, many of them now modern classics - but at the same time, I don't want to be so immersed in this specific moment in time than continuing to find and appreciate newer works.

The Girl from the Sea

 
 
The Girl from the Sea

by Lee Knox Ostertag
Scholastic
2021
 
 
The Girl from the Sea is a YA graphic novel about a human girl who has a summer romance with a selkie. Selkies, you may recall, are mythic creatures a little like mermaids, but instead of a split form, selkies alternate - sometimes taking the shape of a human, sometimes a seal. 
 
In the classic selkie stories, a selkie woman and a human man fall in love, she moves to the land to live with him, and he takes her 'seal skin', the magic cloak that is also part of her body that allows and compels her to transform. They maybe have kids. Eventually something goes wrong (possibly infidelity or abuse), the husband returns the seal skin, possibly by accident, and the wife returns to the ocean. The movie Song of the Sea is a selkie story, and of course Sofia Samatar's "Selkie Stories are for Losers", and the Decemberists' song "The Crane Wife" is a cousin to a selkie story. "The Girl from the Sea" takes this basic plot and reimagines it as a modern-day queer love story.
 
Morgan is a teen living in a small island community off the coast of Nova Scotia. Her parents are recently divorced, and she and her little brother live with mom. Her brother is especially unhappy and has been acting out. Morgan's part of a clique of four girls centered on the richest girl in their class, Serena. Serena's parents own a small cruise line, and their new, too-large boat that will be based on the island is the talk of the town. Morgan is secretly gay, but doesn't feel able to tell her friends or family. She plans to move away for college and come out then.
  

One night when she goes to the shore to get out of the house, Morgan slips on the wet rocks, falls in the ocean, and starts drowning. She sees a seal, then a girl underwater, and then the girl saves her, and Morgan (convinced this is a dream) gives her a kiss. The next day, the girl shows up again, on land this time, and introduces herself as Keltie. She's a selkie, and Morgan's kiss has let her take human form. When she puts her seal skin back on and returns to the ocean, she'll have to stay for 7 years, so would Morgan like to see if maybe there was some real feeling behind that kiss and go on a date?
 
Morgan is so surprised, anxious about anyone realizing she has a crush on a girl, and afraid of her mean-girl friends judging Keltie, that she's not very good company. Keltie says she'd rather return to the ocean than continue being treated like an embarrassment, and Morgan offers to try again, taking Keltie's seal skin so she can remain on land as long as she wants. We get a great montage sequence of Morgan's friends texting her and her ghosting them while spending all day sneaking around with Keltie, enjoying the island and kissing.
 
Then Morgan's little brother sees them making out, and, in a bid for his sister's attention (she's been ignoring him along with her friends), he tells their mom. Morgan runs away, has a huge fight with Keltie, and breaks up with her. It turns out Keltie hasn't only come to the land to date her, she also wants to find a way to sink the new cruise boat or get it to change its route to avoid disturbing her seal family - and right after Morgan was outed was probably the worst time to tell her. To top it off, Serena reaches out by text, and Morgan fights with her too.
 
After this disaster of a night, Morgan spends the rest of the book trying to repair her relationships - with her family, her friends, and with Keltie. It helps that her mom fully accepts Morgan as a lesbian! Serena invites Morgan to her upcoming birthday party on the giant new boat, and Morgan invites Keltie as her date. Will her friends accept her being gay too? Will Keltie cause a shipwreck, or can Morgan maybe just talk to her friend about it? The party is the book's climax, with all the possibilities coming together. Amidst the action, someone falls overboard, and Keltie has to don her seal skin for the rescue. This means she and Morgan will have to spend 7 years apart, but the book ends on a hopeful note that their relationship might survive the wait.
 
Osterberg's art is colorful and expressive. He devotes some pages to group chat text messages that show off the friend clique's dynamic. The montage sequence of Morgan and Keltie's summer romance are some of the best in the book. I also like how Osterberg portrays Keltie's transformation. The seal skin is like a scarf of shimmering blue-grey fabric, and when Keltie wears it, it's like she's putting on the sleek body of a harbor seal over her own. 
 
My complaint about the book would be that all the conflicts are resolved so easily that the second half of the book is not nearly as dramatic as it could be. Morgan's mom accepts her. Morgan forgives her brother, who helps her make a dress to win Keltie back. The friends and Keltie alike welcome Morgan back just because she asks, and the events of Serena's birthday party lead to reconciliation rather than any permanent rift. Seeing how well thing work out, and how effortlessly, the fear that led Morgan to keep her sexuality a secret from everyone end up seeming unfounded, and the problems caused by that secrecy unnecessary.

The Lobster Gangs of Maine

 
 
The Lobster Gangs of Maine
by James Acheson

University Press of New England

1988 
 
 

I must have bought The Lobster Gangs of Maine at a used bookstore when I was in grad school, because it surely spent a couple decades in a professor's office before that, something they were assigned in one of their own graduate classes, or an early career purchase when they wanted to fill out their shelves. I just thought it was neat. Recently I re-found it on my own shelves and decided to give it a read.
 
Published in 1988, The Lobster Gangs of Maine is a final summation of 15 years of research conducted by James Acheson and various grad students, research assistants, and collaborators. Acheson notes in the intro that his original manuscript was over 700 pages, but he managed to edit it down to a tight 150, plus references and about 20 pages of photographs from the field. As a result, while this is still an academic book, it's remarkably accessible to general readers. Acheson focuses on sharing what he learned, without drawing much on social theory. The research for Lobster Gangs was mostly ethnographic observation, mostly conducted on the boats and docks where lobster fisherman do their work.
 
Acheson walks us through the geography of the Maine coast and history of lobster fishing there, the culture of the towns and hamlets where fisherman live and the operation of the 'harbor gangs' that control access to fishing opportunities. He explains how lobster fishing actually works and the status differences that open up between the more and less skilled fishers in the same gang, the economics of fishermen selling their catches to dealers and dealers selling them on to wholesalers and retail customers, and some of the environmental and economic problems affecting the industry during the time of the study. I was most interested in the early chapters, especially chapter 2, about the social organization of rural life in coastal towns and within the gangs themselves.
 
Lobsters eat plankton that thrive near the surface of the ocean where sunlight is abundant, but they live on the ocean floor where the water is rich in nutrients and there are plenty of rocks to hide among. So the biggest concentrations of lobsters are in shallow waters, both right near the coast and further out where the geology of the sea floor brings it closer to the surface. Lobsters migrate in a large circle over the course of the year. They are most active and easiest to catch in the warmest months. They molt their shells once a year and then regrown new, larger ones, and spend this vulnerable time in hiding. Lobsters that are too small get thrown back to grow another year, as do female lobsters with visible egg sacs. 
 
Lobstermen fish by lowering traps with bait to the sea floor. Set in the right spot at the correct angle, a trap might catch a lobster a day, although usually it takes longer. The skill of lobster fishing comes in knowing the sea floor, the migration routes, the right places at the right times. This information is shared within harbor gangs and kept secret from others; even within gangs, men have secrets, but they also have friends and relatives in the gang who they owe advice and help to. Traps are tied to long ropes that are also tied to buoys which let the fishermen find them and pull them up. If the rope breaks (or is deliberately cut), the trap is lost and can't be recovered.
 
The social life of coastal Maine is divided between the old, established families who are 'insiders' and a mix of vacationers and newer arrivals who are all considered 'outsiders'. To be honest, I think this is more of less true in rural anywhere, and maybe anywhere anywhere, although as a perpetual outsider myself, it's a little hard for me to judge. The established families are all very large, though most people only recall back to their grandparents' generation with any certainty, plus a handful of locally famous ancestors. They value independence and self-sufficiency, small-business ownership, conservative politics, loyalty to the community, and belonging to multiple civic and religious groups. Education, (especially college, but also kindergarten, for some reason) and really anything that causes people to move away, is viewed with suspicion. 
 
Summer home owners are not part of the community. Newcomers aren't initially, but can integrate by sending their kids to the local schools, joining the local clubs, and showing their commitment to adopting the old ways instead of changing them. Acheson notes that only members of established families can win local political office - first of all, their relatives form a sizeable voting bloc, and also, no insider would vote for someone they don't know, either personally, or by their family's reputation. Outsiders can only join lobstering gangs if they are on the path to assimilation.
 
When Acheson calls the groups of men who all fish out of the same harbor 'gangs', he's not just speaking metaphorically. Each harbor has a single gang that controls that turf, and you either join the gang or you don't get to fish (or at least, not for long). Each gang also controls a territory of coastal waters where only they can fish, although there are occasional skirmishes along the borders between neighboring territories. 
 
Gangs mostly defend their territory with the destruction of property rather than interpersonal violence, and mostly by cutting the ropes holding lobster traps (which offers a degree of plausible deniability), although in rare cases it case escalate to breaking traps that are sitting on the docks or setting someone's boat on fire. Attacks tend to be anonymous, retaliation is easy, and the costs add up, so gangs try to avoid open conflict. But an interloper trying to fish the gang's turf will find it hard to catch much when his traps keep getting cut and other mishaps start to befall his equipment.
 
In theory, lobstermen can sell their to whoever they want to try to get the highest price, but in practice, each fisher has a long-term relationship with a specific dealer, and dealers in the same area all pay nearly the same price. By giving up in the chance to 'sell around' to different buyers, the lobstermen gain a guaranteed customer, even when there's a glut of lobsters. (In turn, the dealers get a loyal supplier who'll sell what they have, even when there's a drought.) There are a few large wholesalers operating out of Boston, but most of the lobster trade is made up of small buyers and sellers. 

Acheson thinks the nature lobster fishing makes it resistant to rationalization and vertical integration. He expects the industry structure to remain much the same, even despite problems like inflation and declining lobster stocks in the 1980s. Although there remains potential for a 'tragedy of the commons' problem with overfishing, the harbor gangs help limit the amount of fishing, and individual fishermen respect the laws against keeping too-young or egg-laying lobsters.

Soft

 
  
Soft

by Jane Mai

adapted from the novel by Sheridan Le Fanu 

Peow

1872, adapted 2015, reprinted 2024 
 
 
Jane Mai's Soft is a graphic novel adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, set in Hong Kong in the 1990s. Carmilla was one of the early vampire stories, and maybe the first to feature a lesbian vampire. Mai first published Soft as a zine in 2014; the edition I read is an expanded reprint from a decade later. Whatever Mai added is integrated seamlessly, I really can't imagine what wasn't in the first version. Mai's art is pencil on graph paper, and it's been riso printed in purple. The negative space is mostly white, but some of the graph lines remain faintly visible, in a way that seems intentional and contributes to an overall effect that the comic might've been drawn by its narrator, 15 year-old Laura.
 
Laura lives in an apartment with her dad, who runs a popular Chinese restaurant. She likes riding her bike and phys ed class, but also making precise architectural drawings of the apartment and her bedroom. She's close friends with her classmate June. She's only barely a teen, still practically a kid. Lara is also secretly a lesbian, and ashamed of herself for it. 
 
One night, Laura crashes her bike after nearly hitting a black cat with fascinating eyes. When Laura tries to look for the cat, she meets a girl her own age instead - Carmilla. Lara and Carmilla quickly become close friends, then lovers. Carmilla is the perfect girlfriend, able to sneak in Lara's bedroom window at night despite the height of the building, always gone before sunrise, never getting caught by Laura's dad. 
 
Laura starts off naive, but she let's us know that she quickly comes to understand what's going on. She and Carmilla never speak of it, but she's aware. She knows what will eventually happen if they keep dating, what eventually happens to every girl Carmilla likes. Laura wants us to know - she's choosing this.
 
The news reports that other girls Laura's age around the city have started turning up dead mysteriously. Her dad wants her to stay home and stop riding her bike, for safety, and Laura is happy to stay in her room, with Carmilla. We can track a change in Laura by her reaction to each new death. At first she's horrified and sad, but she's being degraded her relationship with a vampire. We see her grow indifferent, even contemptuous of the victims.
 
Laura becomes withdrawn at school, distant from June. Her attention and focus are on Carmilla. She's tired from staying up late every night, pale from blood loss. She becomes surly, misses class, keeps needing to see the school nurse.
 
A lot of the Soft is drawn in a relatively simplified style, but in places, Mai gives us a large panel with more realism, more detail and shading. There's a scene in the nurse's office where the nurse asks Lara if her boyfriend is hurting her. Up until now, we've seen her look 'tired' with cartoon squinty eyes and a single line frown. But then we get a realistic close-up, seeing Laura as the nurse might, with dark circles under her eyes, bruises and bandages on her neck, blood spots on her blouse. It's like the vaseline has been wiped off the lens, like the difference between remembering what someone looks like and suddenly seeing them in person. It's like studiously ignoring something right in front of you, and then being forced to pay attention to it.
 
The moment of realization comes later for Laura than for the audience. She's confronted by how much she's changed when her estranged friend June is injured after being attacked by a black cat with fascinating eyes. Visiting June in the hospital, Laura remembers what she used to be like before Carmilla, and decides she can't continue on as she has been...
 
Mai's comic is surprisingly moving, and I think a large part of its success is how well both the text and the art match the voice of a teen girl. It's easy to see why Laura is attracted to mysterious, sophisticated Carmilla, and painful but believable to watch how their relationship not only hurts her, but transforms her. Carmilla's vampirism is literal within the story, but it's also an effective metaphor for the way a bad relationship can drain the life out of you.

Tower Dungeon 4

 
 
Tower Dungeon 4

by Tsutomu Nihei
translated by Sam Malissa

Kodansha

2026 

 

 

The fourth volume of Tsutomu Nihei's Tower Dungeon is kind of an interlude from the rest of the story so far. We follow an all-new party of adventurers into the Dragon Tower, and only at the very end do they intersect with Yuva, Lilisen, and Enriquo.
 
The group comes together around Iscale, a scholar sent by the head of the royal guard, Minsabelle, who is the aunt of the kidnapped princess and is likely to be coronated by parliament if the rescue isn't successful soon. Minsabelle also sent the regular army, and Iscale's small group will meet up with them partway through the volume. His small band of adventurers self-selects on the boat ride over - they're all the people with unbearable sea-sickness, and Iscale has anti-nausea medicine.
 
Earlier in the series, we met a cat-woman, and now we meet a mouse-woman, the warrior Chufaree and her mouse-man bodyguard. Sargan is dwarf and a pyromancer like Lilicen. (Seeing Sargan's fire magic makes me think that Lilisen is unusually powerful.) Aridelia is a young woman in antique plate armor, and seems like she's anxious and in over her head most of the time. Iscale has a mute bodyguard and a magic diary that lets him communicate instantly with Minsabelle, and she keeps scolding him for treating it like an actual diary rather than as a way to send important memos. Iscale is also a member of the royal family, and thus has the ability to turn into a dragon... although he's physically very weak compared to the others we've seen.
 
Sargan actually came to the tower to kill Carache, the evil nobleman who previously attacked Yuva's little sister, but he agrees to travel with the others, who are all there to rescue the princess. They enter the tower and advance up the levels, then see the army arriving and wait for the soldiers to get up to them. But alas, the army is ambushed, and Iscale's group is helpless to save them!
 
The adventurers witness the entire army turned to stone and then broken to pieces by thee giant basilisk moths. The moths' coordinated attack could only happen if they were being remotely controlled by another intelligence, which means these are undead basilisks. After breaking the statues, the moths tear themselves apart, which returns stone to flesh. Then maggots rain down from the ceiling. We're told this is how necromancers, like the giant tentacled man who kidnapped the princess, create their undead servants. The maggots crawl into the massacre and turn the entire army into zombie soldiers.
 
This is really bad! Worse, as Iscale's group continues upstairs, they run into the evil dracomorph Carache, and he's a zombie too! We're told that undead dracomorphs become very strange, and he looks it - half man, half dragon, and it looks like his parts are just being held loosely in place by tentacles. Iscale's group is no match for this horror, but fortunately, this is when they cross paths with Yuva and his friends, who defeat the undead Carache and agree to work together with the new adventurers.
 
One thing we learn along the way, which only makes sense in light of the scene of the maggots animating the zombie soldiers (and even still has some implications I don't fully understand) is that Aridelia is some kind of sentient zombie. She's insistent that no one see her without her armor, but the mouse-lady Chufaree sees her bathing from a distance while the others are sleeping. Aridelia somehow lays her own maggots and then swallows them, which I guess is why she's self-aware and not being controlled by a necromancer? Chufaree misunderstands the glimpse she saw and believes that Aridelia is trans, but she supports her friend living as a woman. That's nice! But I wonder how Chufaree and the others will react if they realize Aridelia is undead? 

Tom Lake

 
 
Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

Harper

2023 

 

 

One of my library coworkers recommended Tom Lake to me. (In fact, she liked it so much, she gave away a copy at last year's staff book exchange!) I often read books about artists at the start of their careers, or young women coming-of-age, but the framing of Ann Patchett's version is new to me. The present-day of Tom Lake is the summer of 2020, when three adult daughters in their mid-20s return home to the family cherry farm to help with the harvest, and their mother, the book's narrator, a woman in her mid-50s, tells her girls about how she used to be an actress, and dated a man who later became a famous movie star.
 

The text of the book is how Lara tells this story to herself, both the flashbacks to her own early-20s when she thought she was at the beginning of one sort of life, and the present-day interludes, when she is in the middle of a very different way of living, when she thinks about the summer harvest and describes how her girls are reacting to the tale. We hear the story as she knows it, but we're also periodically informed that she has chosen not to tell her daughters something. For example, she leaves out all the sex in the version they hear (but not the one we read), and at the end, she recalls a final meeting between herself and the star that only she and we get to know about.
 
In the summer of 2020, Lara and her husband own a cherry farm in Michigan. Most of the seasonal workers aren't there this year because of the pandemic, and the girls are home instead of at school for the same reason. The story is partly just to pass the time, and partly to satisfy the girls' curiosity about an early chapter of their mother's life that they've long been vaguely aware of but never known the details of. The eldest daughter is the only one with a green thumb. She's been dating the neighbor boy since they were kids, she'll take over the farm when her parents retire. As a teen, she was convinced that the movie star, Peter Duke, was her real father. The middle girl is in veterinary school, and the youngest wants to be an actress - she's at least as interested in her mom's early career as in her famous fling. Throughout most of the book, I wanted to applaud Lara's husband for being so secure in their marriage and never seeming threatened or jealous of his wife's old flame, though by the end I thought, since he knows how this story goes, of course he doesn't feel insecure!
 
Lara got into acting as a high school senior, in the play Our Town. Until then she expected to take over her grandmother's sewing store. She got discovered by a talent scout who was there to see his own niece, got an audition for a movie, got the part, moved to LA. The movie was filmed but got delayed coming out. Lara did a couple seasons of a tv show, and tried out for Our Town on Broadway. She didn't get it, but was offered a last-minute replacement spot in a prestigious summer theater troupe, Tom Lake up in Michigan.
 
At Tom Lake, Lara meets Duke and they're instantly smitten with each other. Duke is affable and charismatic, but also troubled. (In the present day, the girls tell their mom it's not okay to call someone 'crazy.') He has boundless, sometimes manic energy, he obsesses over his roles, he drinks far too much. Soon Lara is also friends with Duke's brother Sebastian, and with her own understudy, Pallas. The summer seems magical and endless. I remember times in my own life that were like that. That enchanted feeling that accompanies falling in love contributes to the timeless quality, I think. 
 
But we know, we've known from the start, that it falls apart. Lara doesn't stay with Duke, doesn't keep acting. When the end comes, it's sad, and feels inevitable. Eventually Lara marries a farmer and happily raises three daughters with him.
 
In the present day, they pick cherries, discuss the story, talk about their fears for the future, how climate change will affect the farm, whether or not to have children of their own, they worry how the enforced pause of the pandemic will affect their own career trajectories, especially the youngest girl, who's aching to get started.
 
One recurring theme of the book is the loss of that youthful sense of invulnerability and special destiny. Everything goes right for Lara until it doesn't, until it briefly all goes wrong. Even before that, she realizes the limits of her range as an actress, and struggles to perform something new. Pallas is at least as good as Lara is, and she can sing and dance too. Sebastian is an incredible tennis player, but he's not quite good enough to go pro. There's always someone better, and for the most competitive jobs, the line ahead of you might simply be too long.
 
But another theme is second chances, and the way earlier events that may not have seemed important at the time can become the building blocks for a new life after the old one falls apart. Lara met her eventual husband at Tom Lake, although they didn't fall in love until meeting again by chance, years later. After she stops acting, Lara starts sewing again. (This is more or less how I became a librarian after my first-choice career didn't work out.)
 
There are some books that probably aren't good picks for high school reading, not because they're too hard, but because they're about events and emotions that happen later in life, that teenagers can't understand because they're not ready to yet. At the time in your life when you feel invincible and like you'll change the world and be famous and beloved when you grow up, the last thing you want to read is a book that tells you 'no you won't', and that needs you to believe it in order to understand. Lara's daughters, in the midst of their own quarter-life crises, are perfectly positions to appreciate their mom's.
 
I enjoyed this one, especially the way it's told. Patchett's plot and characters feel very natural and realistic. It's easy to believe this could've really happened to someone, and that she would've felt this way about it afterward.