Zibby Oneal

I somehow missed this book when I was growing up. I generally skipped directly from kiddie lit to adult books without ever reading through the offerings available for teens although I do still have my old, yellowed copy of Oneal's The Language of Goldfish so she must have been on my radar at some point.

This book is a symphony of color and image, so viscerally visual that Oneal's descriptions easily inhabit the reader's mind's eye. And this is apropos in a book where main character Kate, a show more high school senior, is the daughter of a famous painter. She used to paint herself but has given it up in an effort to find something that is truly her own: in her case, language and words. Kate has a complicated relationship with her father, thinking that everything in their family is designed to cater to his painting muse and genius. She in antogonistic about what she sees as his dominance so when a graduate student arrives to catalog his paintings for a retrospective, she expects her father to overwhelm and diminish this latest visitor to their home.

But Ian is easy going and charming, recognizing and admiring Marcus Brewer's greatness but not seeming the lesser for this recognition. And as the summer progresses and Kate recovers from the bout of mono that had derailed her original summer plans, she starts to see life, her father, the future, and even her own long dormant talent at painting in a different light thanks to Ian's outlook. A summer where Kate learns about love and disappointment and where she looks beneath the surface of her father, like looking at the way an artist creates the play of light over an image on canvas, the story of Kate's growing up is beautifully rendered.

Impressive given the age of the novel, this book is not dated in any way. It is not long and certainly doesn't focus on the expected tropes of the YA genre but it is timeless and well done. Kate is realistic as is her attitude. I found her frustrating in the beginning, certain that she knew the way that things should be and the ways in which her parents were so wrong, stubborn in her convictions, and unmoved by others' assertions that she doesn't necessarily have the only perspective on things. But her gradual opening up to a bigger reality than she had accounted for showed a young woman coming into her own and becoming an adult. YA fans would do well to revisit this book and even those who missed it the first time around will appreciate it. show less

Would have been better if Oneal didn't shoehorn in Carrie's "cure" and closure. Some of the scenes are written beautifully, especially the ones during her "episodes", but the book starts going downhill the "better" she got, losing the charm it had during Carrie's worst moments.

Carrie's illness was never given a name, and it was all a bit too easily resolved - she decided that it was time she grew up (symbolised by getting a bra), and everything was going to be fine. But I am rather older than its target audience and I think teenagers would enjoy it more than I did.

It suffered rather in comparison with a novel on the same subject which I read as a teenager "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" by Joanne Greenberg (aka Hannah Green), which goes much more deeply into show more metal illness and its affect on a teenager and her family. show less

I thought this was a very nice short story about a little girl learning about the struggles women go through to fight for equality. Lily is a solid character; The book is too short to do much character-building, but we see her cheering on her grandmother's cause without really thinking too much about it, and then we see her experiencing that same "females can't do these things!" discrimination, and she takes a stand. For such a short book intended for young readers, I think it's well-written show more and gets the point across. show less