Lady Business

'Of course, that's revealing of some unpleasant truths about me and my own assumptions and blind spots'. It reveals quite a bit about my own education (and the reading baggage that I've got piled behind me). When I was in primary school we had a teacher who read us a story about a character named Bill, who had to climb a flag pole for adventure(idky). Anyway the twist of the story is that the character turns out to be a girl! That's always stuck with me, along with the old Enid Blyton tradition of naming girls characters boy names (George, Bill). I know Blyton's novels have their serious cultural issues, but love her for her pro-tomboy stance. Anyway I'm always on the look out for that trope now. And yeah I did wonder if I was over thinking the 'is this novel totally unreliable' area of things in light of a very tricky book called 'Gould's Book of Fish' by Richard Flanagan, which just argh, the ending, so good but so wtf!

Reese is the character unnamed narrator (Is it Hilary, or Lesley? I've forgotten exactly what his name turns out to be) heavily implies is gay (the bit about him choosing to join in with the other boys when they laugh about narrator and Finn being gay, because he has his own secrets). He's swept away to sea. I just wanted to try a new tagging way to see if it worked as a way of identifying and calling out dominant narratives...so for example for Downton posts I'd tag them with 'of course the gay character is evil'. Works/will get a bit tiring - thoughts?

Oh and the manic pixie dream narrative, yes I totally see that! It was in the back of my mind the other day when I was talking about Alex from 'The Vast Fields of Ordinary' and I talked about it a bit in comments here: http://www.phoebenorth.com/2011/06/10/death-of-a-manic-pixie/#idc-container I think this is the kind of novel that shows off all the best bits of MPD personhood (autonomy, deep quiet thought, spontenaity). Do you think it complicates things that Finn eventually turns out to be a manic pixie girl, not a boy?