Woman Wins Praise

Joanna Trollope. The Book Boy.

Marianne at Good Reads remarks on the style and muses as to its purpose.

This novella is written in a very simplistic style: the reader might wonder if Trollope has actually written it for adults who are learning to read.

It just so happens that The Book Boy is published in the Quick Reads series which Wikipedia informs us are designed with a specific reader in mind:

Quick Reads are a series of short books by bestselling authors and celebrities. With no more than 128 pages, they are designed to encourage adults who do not read often, or find reading difficult, to discover the joy of books.

Alice, the protagonist of The Book Boy can't read and her story ends with the quietly noticed but quite remarkable triumph — she does learn to read and the book ends with a newspaper headline that is read and resonates with the plot: Woman Wins Prize. And she does so with the uncanny assistance of an adjuvant (to borrow a term of art from Greimas drawing on Propp): it is the lame Ram Chandra who observes that the boy, Scott, wants what Alice wants, that is freedom and true freedom is though unstated in the book grounded in a liberty of expression that is the ability to express:

"You don't know his home life," Ram said. "He can't say. He doesn't know how to say. He only knows how to act." He looked at Alice. "He can't say. Just like you can't read." He smiled. "That's why he picked on you."

The "opposant" becomes an "adjuvant" and saying comes via acting.

And so for day 2134
16.10.2012