Despite my goal to start reading all the heavy classics that I have on my TBR shelf, I needed something lighter the past few days. So I reread Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman.
My sister read it a few months ago and said that she thought it ended in a strange place because you really don't know what's going to happen with our heroine. I hadn't read it in years so couldn't remember it well enough to comment at the time.
I can definitely see what she means. Catherine's fate is uncertain at the end of the book. But the book ends at the close of her childhood and just before a new chapter in her life begins. So although I'm left wondering what happened to Catherine, I feel that what happens next would be another book entirely. And yet I don't think Cushman would write that book because the next book would be Catherine stepping into adulthood and wouldn't fit into the YA genre anymore.
The appeal of this book is a spunky, independent girl in a world where most women were neither of those things. And we'd all like to think we could be the same in her situation, but I don't believe that any of us can really know what we would have been like in a different time and place, if we had been raised in a completely different world. It makes me grateful for being born when I was, and especially grateful that one of my regular household chores if not catching and squishing the fleas in my bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment