Issue 15: Tough Girls
Hey there!
Female protagonists come in all shades and flavors, but today we’re focusing on the tough ones. These girls haven’t been dealt an easy hand in life, but what they do have is the grit and moxie to make a difference–hardship isn’t anything new to them, after all, so why should it stop them from pursuing a better life? In the June issue, Alex joins a scrappy housekeeper’s kid on her adventures through the sun-soaked Florida Keys in Turtle in Paradise, and Claudia writes about best friends investigating a mining town gone bad in The Low, Low Woods.
Alex on Turtle in Paradise
There are few authors I love more than Jennifer L. Holm, and the novel that best encapsulates Holm’s special sauce—the optimism and clarity she brings to her middle-grade historical fiction, most of which is set in hardscrabble times and structured around a family tragedy—just might be Turtle in Paradise. Turtle, a cynical eleven-year-old dumped on her aunt’s Key West doorstep during the height of the Great Depression, believes that “relations are nothing but trouble.” And she’s not wrong.
Turtle in Paradise is about a lonely girl searching for paradise; it’s also about how elusive paradise can be. Her mother, Sadiebelle, dreams of picture-perfect happy endings (“I blame Hollywood,” says Turtle), but perfection isn’t exactly thick on the ground on Curry Lane. Aunt Minnie nurses a resentment for her younger sister that she takes out on Turtle. It’s perfectly crystalized in a scene where, delirious from a scorpion sting, she mistakes Turtle for her sister and demands to know why Sadiebelle stole her paper dolls. Meanwhile, Nana Philly, Turtle’s long-estranged grandmother, hates Turtle thanks to a choice her mother made years ago. Family might be the people who always take you in, but it’s also the roots of the history that those people will hold against you.
Not one to sit around waiting for rescue, Turtle bides her time helping out with her cousins’ babysitting service and unwittingly winning over Nana Philly with crankiness that’s more than a match for the old woman’s. She slowly warms up to Aunt Minnie, but Turtle knows that soon her mother and her mother’s fiancé, Archie will come to take her away—at least, that’s what Archie’s always promised.
Turtle doesn’t usually rely on promises. Still, after weeks of surviving her messy, sprawling Key West family, a tidy Hollywood ending starts to look pretty good. And Archie seems kind and reliable; a door-to-door salesman, he can sell just about anything. Including dreams.
When Turtle and her cousins uncover a cache of long-buried pirate treasure, their story makes the papers and brings Sadiebelle and Archie back to Key West. For a couple of hours, it seems like their happy ending is in reach, except of course it isn’t. Nabbing Turtle’s share of the treasure, Archie sails for Cuba, leaving Turtle and Sadiebelle behind. And that’s how their story ends—with Turtle and her mom stranded on Curry Lane, their family only just beginning to come back together.
Like all of Holm’s novels, Turtle in Paradise contains moments of almost unbearable sadness, yet Turtle’s ending is far from depressing. The key as to why lies back in Aunt Minnie’s delirious episode, when she mistakes Turtle for Sadiebelle. Scorpion venom brings up her old resentment, but also something else; she admits that she’s missed her sister. Turtle, trying to comfort her, promises, “I’ll take care of you.” It’s a small, simple moment that doesn’t quite resolve the tension between them, but it’s also when resentment wears down to the pain underneath, and love shows through. In big, bickering families like Turtle’s, resentment and love are sometimes so tangled together that you can’t have one without the other. Accepting the tangle means giving up on dreams of paradise.
But who needs paradise anyway? On her story’s last page, Turtle decides, “It may not be a Hollywood ending, but then I’m no Shirley Temple.” Without illusions of perfection, she chooses to lean back on her family; she resents them and loves them as much as they resent and love her. Archie’s promise of perfection was a shiny lie, but Curry Lane, cramped and dirty and real, is much more than perfection. It’s home.
Claudia on The Low, Low Woods
My library shelves the bind-up of The Low, Low Woods in its teen section. Released by DC’s Black Label, the comic limited series (written by Carmen Maria Machado, drawn by Dani, and colored by Tamra Bonvillain) isn’t specifically marketed to a teen audience, but its disturbing and sometimes bleak themes are so quintessentially young adult, it’s hard to quibble with my library’s decision. Diving into the personal and generational impact of environmental destruction and sexual violence, The Low, Low Woods filters its themes through the eyes of two teenage girls on the cusp of adulthood in a dying mining town.
Octavia and El are best friends who may one day grow into something more (the comic is unapologetically queer), but who harbor very different ideas about their future in Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania. Octavia is determined to go to college, while El believes her family’s lack of money prevents her from leaving. These differences come to a head when the girls wake up in a movie theater unable to remember the last few hours. Uncovering what happened to them that night leads to supernatural encounters and the truth behind the town’s physical and moral decay.
The town’s environmental devastation is intrinsically linked to the victimization of its female citizens. When they visit the local witch, the girls learn that an abandoned resort houses a spring that “r[uns] away memory.” The witch compares the spring to the River Lethe from Greek mythology, which the dead drank from to forget their mortal lives. Men from Shudder-to-Think have been using the water for generations to rape women and girls and then erase their memories of the event. By trying to punish these men, the witch enacted the spell that caused the underground fire that destroyed the mines, and, with them, the town’s livelihood.
By pairing ecological and sexual violence, the comic dramatizes the very real ethical consequences a land’s history can enact on the people who inhabit it. Just as significant are the references to the River Lethe. By alluding to ancient Greece, considered the cradle of the Western world, Machado shows how violence against the other—any person, culture, or identity regarded as alien or suspect by a dominant group—is endemic to organized society. While combating this violence is necessary for any kind of justice or closure, the comic doesn’t shy away from showing the price of doing so. In one of its most chilling moments, a boy tells Octavia she “begged” for the water after she was assaulted. Erasure of trauma can be a survival mechanism, even as acknowledgement is necessary in order to fight for change.
The Low, Low Woods doesn’t provide a cut-and-dried solution for this dilemma. Octavia and El defeat the monsters and discover an antidote that will counteract the water’s effects, but they leave the decision of whether or not to take it up to each individual. They seem to decide that the most powerful gesture they can make is returning some measure of choice to the women who were robbed of it.
As always, thank you so much for reading. Hey, Kid! will be back next month.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia