When his mom leaves to go find herself, Sam's dad whisks him and his brother off to a beach town for the summer. The beach town has the odd local feature of boatloads of eerie, beautiful blond girls, all of whom are weirdly interested in Sam.
This book makes me uncomfortable. I can't tell if it's commentary on gender roles and sexism, if it was supposed to be commentary on gender roles and sexism that got lost under displays of the harms of gender roles and sexism, or if it's just kind of sexist. Whatever way you slice it, it wasn't fun to read.
Sam meditates a great deal on masculinity. His father talks about him "becoming a man." Sam's brother, Jeff is a pig who sees women as objects with which to have sex and is determined to get Sam laid over the summer. Sam's negative reaction to this would suggest that the book's condemning such behavior. But then it tries to make Jeff sympathetic while Sam slut-shames and uses gendered slurs throughout the book, at which point it feels less like a condemnation and more like a gritty, honest description of how boys behave.
Apparently boys are gross.
Then there's the fact that the girls are all the same. They're blond and tan and stare at Sam whenever he goes to the beach. There's some weirdness where Sam can't tell them apart, even to the point of second guessing whether the one he's talking to is the one he's dating. They are interchangeable sex objects. Yikes.
It turns out that the girls can control how they look and they decide to look as appealing as they possibly can, so they make themselves blond with tight butts, and they flip their hair, and wear lip gloss and short-shorts. So that sounds like commentary on how women are told by society that they need to look a certain way, especially if they want to be desirable.
But then it's weird that they all look the same if their goal is to catch attention. Maybe that's a message too, that if women really did make themselves look a certain way to appeal to the male gaze, they'd all end up looking the same. Then there's a moment in the book where one of the girls talks about how she saw a picture of Beyoncé and thought she was the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen. Well, then why doesn't she look like Beyoncé? Maybe this says something about the difference between what women find attractive in themselves and what they think men would find attractive in them, but it also has the odor of white supremacy. And then I think these are all layers that I've added on to this by thinking about it too much.
And then there's the heart of the girls' story: they are cursed to wash up on the beach and they can't go back to their ocean home unless they sleep with particular dudes. If they don't do this by the time they're twenty-one, they turn into sea foam. Now, this aligns with the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid, but it still reeks of needing a man. And is that really a fairy tale to which you want to stay true? And then it's not even just that they get their curse broken. After the sex they also learn who they are and experience individuality for the first time.
And then this happens:
"It was so weird. Who am I? I mean, really?"So, she's experiencing individuality and coming into her own after her awful curse is broken, but Sam refuses to accept that. He doesn't care what she has to say or how she feels. He's going to call her DeeDee because he knows best.
"You're DeeDee," I said. And then she finally turned and looked at me for the first time since I'd sat down. Her cheeks were streaked with mascara. Her eyes were sharp and probing and she regarded me with a concerned squint that seemed nearly wounded. I wondered if I had said something wrong.
"No," she said. At first she sounded sad, and then she turned angry. "Of course I'm not. DeeDee. God. That's not even my real name."
"Sure it is," I said. "It's what everyone calls you, so it's your name."
"That's not my name," she said, more firmly now. "It's just something I called myself. Before. It doesn't seem right anymore. And it's not my name. It never was."
...
"I just wish I knew my real name," she said. "That seems like it would make everything easier somehow."
I didn't reply. I didn't care what she said. Her real name was DeeDee.
Ick.
So it's either social commentary or gross, and either way I am uncomfortable.
***
Next week: Winter and an overview of The Lunar Chronicles, sci-fi retellings of fairy tales by Marissa Meyer.
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