Six Degrees of Separation: From ‘Beezus and Ramona’ to ‘Another Brooklyn’

First of May; First Saturday in the month, and so Six Degrees of Separation Day. This meme, hosted on BooksaremyFavouriteandBest involves Kate choosing a book and then participants suggest other books that they have read that spring to mind. You can learn more about it and join in here.

As usual, I haven’t read the starting book which this month is Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary. Haven’t read it: haven’t even heard of it.

But I do know Beverly Cleary from her book Fifteen. When I was probably thirteen or fourteen myself, I borrowed this book again and again from the school library. This is the paperback edition that the school library held. I was surprised to see that it was published in 1956, and so the book itself would have been about 15 years old when I read it. It was a very American boy-meets-girl story, with cheer squads and soda fountains as I remember it. For the purposes of this Six Degrees, it set me off thinking about similar coming-of-age books about adolescent girls that I loved either at the time, or have come to love as an adult. So that’s the theme I’m going to follow

Another book that I loved and reborrowed continually was Dodie Smith´s I Capture the Castle. I really can´t work out why my parents didn´t actually buy the book, given that I had it on almost continual loan! I now have two copies of it, although I haven’t got round to re-reading it. There´s a young girl narrating this story, too, set in England in a decaying castle where she and her older sister become obsessed with the American family who move in next door. (That’s interesting- these were the front covers that I remember, and they’re both Peacock Books, the Penguin Young Adult imprint).

Another book- or rather, series of books – that I became obsessed with probably forty years later was the Neapolitan Quarter, by Elena Ferrante (my review here). I think that Ferrante captures so well the ambivalence of girl-on-girl friendship and the pain of infatuation. I’m not particularly obsessed with who the actual author is, but I really cannot believe that it would be anyone other than a woman. I’ve really enjoyed the television series as well.

Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry (my review here) was her first, highly autobiographical book, with many parallels with her later autobiography that was filmed by Jane Campion as ‘An Angel at My Table.’ This fictional account has an interesting narrative structure, starting off with a description of the Withers family’s straightened circumstances and the tragedy that defined them, then splitting off into three very different narrative threads tracing through the lives of the three children. I read it while I was over in New Zealand a few years back, when I visited Janet Frame’s home town Oamaru, which she fictionalized as Waimaru in this book.

A more recent coming-of-age book is Emily Bitto’s The Strays (my review here). It reminded me a bit of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between or Ian McEwan’s Atonement in that you have an adult narrator, looking back to their adolescence, when they became embroiled in adult betrayal that they didn’t understand at the time. In this case, young Lily, an only child of very quiet, middle class parents, is fascinated by her friend Eva’s artistic family, very reminiscent of the real-life Heide group of artists. I loved the exuberance of the Trentham family- their loudness and transgressiveness- and the mounting tension as you realized that things were not going to end well.

August, the African-American narrator of Another Brooklyn (my review here) has been taken to Brooklyn by her increasingly-religious father, after her mother’s death. At first she is forbidden to leave their flat, and she observes, and later joins, a group of girls. Each of the girls in this group of four friends has to negotiate her own way through parental demands and inadequacies and each has to find her way into adulthood.

So- all fiction this month, and each one of them a coming-of-age story from a young girl’s perspective.