Meg Cabot

18 June 2018

Cabot is one of my favorite authors: she is reliably entertaining, even when addressing serious themes. And her books never fail to cheer me up. She is literary Prozac, returning the world to favor in my eyes, restoring my sense of perspective.

That's in general. In the specifics this is going to be the best book I read this year. First, it's a retelling of Persuasion, a book I recently re-read and one I now respect far more than I did in my youth (now tying with Pride & Prejudice show more for second behind Northanger Abbey [consider this an invitation to respond with your ranking of Austen]). Second, it deals with aging parents and their progressive deficits, and the responsibility that places on the offspring who then have to step in and address many challenges with no preparation. There is a huge untapped market for childing classes that would cover topics like how to financially guide parents, and home maintenance and repair for seniors who are reluctant to accept help, and downsizing retirees into more manageable homes, and increasing frailty in the aging, and decreased nutrition in people who won't or shouldn't cook. This year has meant having to cope with an entirely new set of care-giving tasks that make nursing a parent through cancer feel easy. This isn't a statement made unknowingly: I have now seen four parents through a total of seven different cancers, and compared to dementia cancer is refreshingly straightforward.

The hard part for the aging parent is losing their independence. For the child (or other relation, or partner, or friend) the hard part is finding a way to help someone who may aggressively reject help. Everyone complains about getting older than we used to be, but no one ever seems to feel old in an absolute sense. The same way no one ever seems to feel adult. I certainly don't. When I look in the mirror I'm always surprised that I'm not still a young-looking 25. Seeing my grandmother's face in the mirror is weird no matter how many decades I've had to get used to it.

But this is where Cabot's skill really amazes me: she's written a book about aging parents and how overwhelming it can be to suddenly have myriad new fires to put out every day and it's a romcom. More than that: it's funny as hell and it's never mean. Not about the older people anyway. Like the heroine Becky, it is sweet, and kind, and understanding. The first time I read Emma I was struck by the way Mr. Woodhouse was treated: yes his whole early nights and gruel advice is silly, and very effectively played for laughs, but the tone is loving and indulgent. Emma wouldn't leave him for anything, and her happy ending includes him. How many writers since Austen have succeeded at pulling off that "silly old bear" tone? The only other I can think of is von Arnim in Enchanted April.

So this is really the perfect book for me this year: light hearted and compassionate and grounded and optimistic. Any other writer mentioning raccoons and cat collectibles would have me ugly crying and full of grief. Not only am I not sad, I am comforted.

Okay, one last way in which Cabot is a superlative author: her backlist has more series than most writers do separate novels, and there isn't a disappointing one in the list. Even Shakespeare has some works that leave me meh (The Winters Tale leaves me cold despite the best stage direction ever). And I still haven't embraced Mansfield Park. Stephen King and Agatha Christie mostly please, but they've both published some duds.

Library copy show less

The last place Suze Simon expects to find herself during Valentine’s Day is a cemetery. But that’s what happens when you’re a mediator – cursed with the “gift” of communicating with the dead.

That’s how Suze has ended up at the graves of a pair of NCDPs - Non-Compliant Deceased Persons – whose drama didn’t end with death. It’s Suze’s job to make sure they move on—for good.

But the NCDPs aren’t the only ones with problems. The reason Suze is spending her Valentine’s show more Day with the undead instead of her boyfriend, Jesse, is because he’s having so much trouble adjusting to life after death . . . not surprising, considering the fact that he used to be an NCDP himself, and now his girlfriend busts his former kind for a living, while he tries to cure his kind of what used to ail him.

Can Suze use her mediating skills to propose a mutual resolution, and bring all these young lovers together - including Jesse and herself - especially on the night Saint Valentine declared sacred to romance?

Or will she end up alone—and possibly undead—herself? show less

I do love a witchy romance. Here, we have Jessica, a non-hereditary witch trying to do good in her part of the world getting people into fabulous fashion (she has a clothing store). Then one day witch Derrick comes into her life, telling her she's the Chosen One and all of a sudden she's mentoring a teenage couple, dealing with her childhood nemesis, and seducing Derrick all while saving her town from being wiped out.

Not having read Cabot before, I really enjoyed the world she created. show more Jessica's friends are absolute delights and Jessica herself is an interesting heroine. I loved hanging out with her. I'm guessing the next book has to do with her brother so I'm looking forward to it. show less

Oh, Meg.

Meg, Meg, Meg. Why did you have to jump on the bad boy paranormal romance bandwagon? Why?

You did so well when you tore apart the new vampire genre in Insatiable, and then you produce this? My heart, Meg. It hurts.

Abandon, a "darkly re-imagined," modern re-telling of the Persephone and Hades myth, marks Meg Cabot's return to the YA paranormal realm. In Abandon, 17 year old Pierce is a NDE - a survivor of a near death experience from an accident when she was 15. Since then, she has show more been followed by a mysterious stranger named John, who has caused serious trouble for her in the living world. Pierce moves with her mother to Florida, but find she's closer to John than ever before and if she's not careful, she'll end up in the Underworld permanently.

I really wanted to like Abandon. You all know me, I'm a huge Meg Cabot fan. If I was a teenager in high school, I probably would've eaten this book up and demanded more immediately. However, now that I've become especially jaded and immediately suspicious of most paranormal romances in the YA section, I was not impressed.

While Pierce was a break from the standard Cabot heroine, there were very few moments when I genuinely liked her because she was so bland. Part of the problem was her narration. Cabot told the backstory of Pierce's death and first trip to Underworld retrospectively and stayed there for a good portion of the book. This led to a lot of repetition, melodramatic foreshadowing, and plot twists that didn't make sense. There is very little action in this book because it's the step-up for the triology, and there were probably only 40 pages I truly enjoyed out of the entire thing and they were in the last third of the book.

The biggest disappointment for me, however, was the love interest John. Once again, we have a heroine falling in love with an asshole she knows for an hour (no, I don't count the two years he STALKED her for "her protection" as relationship development) and staying with him even though she knows he'd rather her be dead and in the Underworld with him. There were few scenes between the two of them that didn't make me uncomfortable, and I kept waiting for Pierce to wake up from her fantasy and stop romanticizing John as a misunderstood, lonely bad boy. And that never happened. Maybe it will in future books, but I definitely won't be picking those up for a long time. show less