I continue to be baffled by the hAtReD for this author’s last adult book, Hide, which I thought was perfectly fine and a good time. But I’m not going to go out of my way to defend it. I didn’t like it that much. But I will defend this one loudly! Luckily, I think overall it is getting better reviews, but still not as good as I think it deserves.
First of all, I think it was a mistake (not sure if the author’s or the publisher’s) to have the author’s note at the end instead of the beginning. I think you need the context of what this story is really about in order to appreciate it. That’s probably a flaw in the writing, that you can’t just read the book and get it (although, I probably could have guessed a significant way in to the story), but I appreciated knowing from the beginning what the book was leading to as it led me to appreciate what the book was going for from pretty much page one. I could be wrong about this, but I think a lot of people are getting too caught up in the weird children’s TV show and not seeing what’s going on underneath.
If you’re curious about the context, the author has left Mormonism, and the book is a way to work through some of her grief and trauma over her experience. She grapples with religious trauma, and specifically with the way that religion limits and controls people for reasons beyond simple spirituality.
This book gave me an excellent catharsis cry on a Saturday morning, so I can’t help but think the best of it. There’s something uniquely special about a television program you watched and loved as a child. The way White harnesses that love and nostalgia and uses it to point out the hypocrisies of religion was brilliant. The TV shows you loved as children are never really what you thought they were if you revisit them as an adult. Adult eyes pull back the curtain. So it makes perfect sense to me to use a nebulous and infamous children’s TV program as a metaphor for peeling back the curtain from real life as well. Sometimes when you do that, you find patriarchy and control and systems that make people small. And sometimes, you find the thing that makes you feel bigger instead. This book does both, and I definitely recommend it.
[4.5 stars]
*The children’s song in the title of my review is a play apparently on the songs that Mormon children are taught to instill Mormon values in them before they are old enough to think about what they are really singing. The book is full of these songs, and I thought they were a great touch. I believe some of them are even taken directly from Mormonism.