Grant

Look I had fun reading this because I loved it in middle school but it relies a LOT on you recognizing certain tropes or archetypes and filling in the picture.

That said, the world is prettyyyyyy sick collage

O'Connor's imagery and prose are captivating. The novel is violent, grotesque, and spiritually challenging. I could not turn away. I will be mulling on my reading for days.

Art that is a picture of a picture let's you step back and examine the scene with more objectivity.

The structure of the novel is set up as a collage. Characters are constantly tearing bits out of other stories and pasting them onto a different one. They stand apart from and examine the boundaries of the stories we tell.

Lovely voice from Ali Smith and a great performance by Melody Grove.

Okay I wrote a LOT of notes for this thing about class, women and children, mirror characters (Uriah is David's Wario), and memory. I started to try and compile them but then I felt like I was writing a paper and I got bored. I fear Dickens would be disgusted with me. So instead here's some unconnected thoughts that stuck with me:

This novel popped for me in its tension between childlike innocence and the evil of the adult world. David is a child pretending to be an adult because the structure of society has forced him to.

The coming of age aspect of this novel highlights the meritocracy of the industrial revolution running into the still immobile class structure of British society.

Women fill the gaps of David's life. They take on hard tasks from a precarious social positions in this novel. Their lives are often oriented around men. They are rarely in the foreground.

Worth re-visiting. Just not in the mood for it at this time.