"Sabriel" by Garth Nix was published in 1998, and a few people in my high school read and enjoyed it. The premise of the book looked good to me, but I tried and failed to get through it at the time.
I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Tim Curry. The book is about a girl named Sabriel who can travel from the land of the living to the realm of the dead. She finds out her dad, Abhorsen, is trapped in death, and she begins her hero's journey to release him back to life. Along the way, she meets Mogget, a free-magic being trapped in a cat's body, and Touchstone, a young man who was turned into a wooden statue for 200 years. Sabriel releases him from his wooden form, and they go on to have a romance toward the end.
The romance was my only serious gripe about the book. "Sabriel" talked about death appropriately for a teenage audience and contained some good themes about grief, coming of age, and letting go of the people we lose. And look, I know that technically Touchstone is not a 200-year-old man because he was in a sort of stasis and his life, maturity and mental state were put on pause for that time. But I'm honestly sick of young adult novels, even one as old as this one, pairing teenage girls with much, much older men.
I think I've written about this before, and a more profound writer could probably better articulate my uneasiness with this theme. There's something grotesque and unsettling about eldritch beings latching on to young women and making it seem that in the centuries they've been alive they couldn't possibly find a more age-appropriate match. I'm not sure we should be feeding teen girls subtext that the predatory attention and admiration from older men is something to be treasured and encouraged. Once you notice it, you can't un-notice it!
No comments:
Post a Comment