Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

“Things that shouldn’t embarrass me: “Standing up for myself and what I believe in (Basically anything that has to do with my body, the way I look, the clothes I wear, the things I say or do, or what I believe.) “Things that should embarrass me: “(This list is purposely left blank because nothing should embarrass me. Who cares what people think? Easier said than done, I know.)” (205-206) My favorite undiagnosed autistic girl returns! Finished reading Something Maybe Magnificent (2024), by R. L. (Rachel) Toalson, the sequel to The First Magnificent Summer. https://www.racheltoalson.com/books/something-maybe-magnificent/ https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Something-Maybe-Magnificent/R-L-Toalson/9781665925532 I don’t read enough new releases to compare this to competitors on the shelves, but by any standard, Tolason is a gem. Something Maybe Magnificent has the same moving writing and positive attitude as the first Victoria Reeves book, but in a much better situation, and with the heroine’s sense of humor back. A feminist character by a feminist author, she grapples with some issues that didn’t as much come up the last summer: what about GOOD men? While her approach is more thoughtful and nuanced than dogmatic, lest the younger intended readership take away any ideological notions that won’t hold up under maturer critical thinking, parental guidance still recommended. Read it along with your daughter or son. You’ll be missing out otherwise. Staying home in rural Texas with her mother, older (but less mature) brother Jack, and little sister Maggie, thirteen-year-old Victoria Reeves anticipates one magnificent summer (per internal indications, it’s 1997), out of sight and mind from her dad who left them and now has a new family (the three kids spent the last summer with him in the first book). As before, Victoria copiously records the happenings in her journals, and Something Maybe Magnificent is comprised of the entries, whether diaristic or in the form of lists, plans, or poems. The wraparound cover art, again by Svetla Radivoeva, shows the opening scene, Victoria getting her Vitamin D in the hammock as she reads Sylvia Plath’s journals. Is Maggie adventurous enough to climb trees? Unfortunately for Victoria, her family life looks about to change again, as her mother’s relationship with Kyle Moreland (is that him playing basketball with Mom?) gets serious. Victoria’s father wound is deep, and there is no doubt in her mind that if her mom gets too close to a man again, history will repeat itself, and she’ll get hurt again, so she has a protracted campaign to make Kyle feel unwelcome and drive him out. But for all her knowledge of how badly her father behaved, she retains guilt over the divorce—and has internalized that it was their fault. After her and Jack totally scare Kyle, and he laughs along with them at having gotten him so good, she reflects, “Kyle was impressed with our prank. The kind of impressed that said he’d be happy to stick around, these kids are awesome. “That should have felt like winning. But to me it felt like losing. Because he hasn’t been around long enough to get to know us. And once he does, well, I know how that story ends. “I’ve had plenty of experience.” (270) And alas for her plans to send Kyle packing! He’s a kind, loving guy, and is already helping out the family, fixing up their home and cooking for them. He’s one great chef! In one of the funniest parts. Victoria’s mom says, “‘…you haven’t really eaten anything.’ “I wanted to say something like, That’s because it’s terrible or I’m not hungry or even I’ve decided I don’t eat meat anymore, but I knew I would hate myself for it later, for no other reason than that it smelled delicious!… “I stuck a small bite of chicken in my mouth. “It tasted as good as it smelled. And that was so tragic.” (196) That, along with “‘First group activity: putt-putt golf’… I knew I was doomed,” is Victoria’s melodrama at its best. What exactly is her problem? Along with her irrepressible sense that her folks splitting was on her, she has trouble reconciling marriage with being an independent woman. “‘You are strong enough on your own,’ she says. “She reminds me when some stupid thing happens at school, like I get an 89 on a test, or worse, a B+ on a writing composition [brainy girl]. ‘You are strong enough on your own.’ “She reminds me when I’m all sore about Jesse Cox smiling at Linsey Bell instead of me. ‘You are strong enough on your own.’ “So why is she getting married again?” A question worth answering. Victoria gets the same message even more brusquely from “Memaw”, her maternal grandmother, also divorced. “I had to trade my perfectly fine and functional backpack—until a litter of kittens was delivered on it—with one of Memaw’s in-your-face bags she likes to buy. I picked the tamest one, which had a quote from Mary Shelley stitched across it: ‘I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.’ It was either that or one with a quote from Margaret Thatcher, who was a British prime minister: ‘If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.’” (15) At least Memaw is a bipartisan man-hater. But even leaving aside her mom’s new romance, it becomes more than an abstract issue for Victoria when she falls, hard, for the new boy next door, Eli Jenkins. For Victoria, next door is a quarter mile off, but an avid runner, she gets into the habit of meeting and running with him in the morning. Read the first page of Victoria’s June 19, 2:48 PM journal entry, to see the care she puts into making sure he sees and meets her while looking her best. That even avowed feminists go to such lengths to appeal to guys, while hiding every trace of effort, should be enough to warm any man’s heart. Yet with the way she was brought up, Victoria doesn’t know if it’s right. In an entry from three days prior, she confessed, “…I’m not really sure if I should be interested in a boy like Eli—or [Jack’s friend] Brian—or any boys at all. It’s unclear, because Mom and Memaw say things like, ‘You don’t need a man to tell you who you are; you don’t even need a man in the first place,’ and ‘Women are just as intelligent and capable of accomplishment as any man’ and ‘Don’t ever let a man have power over you. You’re the one in charge of your life.’ “But does that mean I shouldn’t think a boy is cute or wonder what it would be like to get to know him better or to go out on three runs a day in case he happens to be running too?… “Maybe it’s better to put up some walls so I can stand straight without the help of other people. Is that how feminism works? I DON’T KNOW!!! I’ll have to ask Memaw about it, I guess. Sylvia Plath wrote, ‘How we need another soul to cling to,’ and she was a feminist, I think, so… “Yeah. Nothing’s getting any clearer lying here in the hammock, staring up at the sky. I guess I need another run. “Feminism is confusing.” “I guess I need another run.” Issue unresolved, yet she leans toward deepening her connection with the cute boy, instincts a bit wiser than she knows. Victoria’s hardly unprecedented feminist rage at the world is a recurring feature, but she does have enough awareness to wonder how various notions she finds sexist and tries to root out of her psyche, like that menstruation is something to act ashamed of, or that girls need to watch their weight, ever got there in the first place. Her mother’s a feminist, her grandmother’s a feminist, she reads famous feminist authors, she even has a mass-produced feminist backpack for school, and still, she feels aggrieved, though she has minimal contact with any non-feminists the whole summer. Stepping back for a moment, in the Acknowledgments for Something Maybe Magnificent, Toalson thanks the team at Simon and Schuster’s Aladdin imprint—and all ELEVEN named employees are women. Is the big publishing world a gynocracy? Elsewhere, Toalson wisely encourages aspiring writers to read outside of the genre or age demographic they write for. https://archive.ph/2x1mj Is it sensible to have new books edited by an all-women team? Granted, this is aimed at girls, but, I am here to say, it has something for everyone. Toalson gets plenty of male feedback, from her husband and sons, but are other women authors so lucky? It is no wonder men aren’t as into reading nowadays, when publishers have nary a man’s say between reading the manuscript and binding the leaves? So this book isn’t arising in a patriarchal milieu, either. The women team who made it happen have the power, and rule their industry. Is the feminist ideology running up against intractable nature, which it is simply incapable of changing, and just not making its adherents happy despite its prominent place in the culture? Victoria never comes to ask whether feminism itself might be wrong, harmful for women or to humanity as a whole, though it’s unclear if a woman can even want a relationship with a man, and be a good feminist. That so many women can believe in something that calls into question something necessary for the continuance of the species, makes me wonder whether they are as intelligent as any man. How many men would find our part in love degrading? Though Victoria doesn’t succumb to the worst anti-man ideas, you can see how her ideas would ruin things for her with a boy less stout-hearted than Eli. In one hilarious scene, she blurts out some of her grievances when he asks why she isn’t looking so hot on a run. “‘Did you know that in ancient times women had to go out into the wilderness when they were womenstruating? They couldn’t touch anybody. They were called unclean.’… [Referring to the Mosaic law] “‘Uh… What’s womenstruation?’… “‘You know. The monthly curse.’ “THE MONTHLY CURSE? I sounded like a bitter witch. “My mouth was tragically not finished dumping out words. ‘Did you know that in some cultures’—maybe it was most, but I’m not an expert—‘a period is linked to the moon? They call it a moon cycle. They say we’re at our most powerful when our blood comes.’ “What would it have been like to grow up in a culture like that? Would I wake up feeling powerful instead of puffy? “My stomach cramped, like it was trying to answer my question but didn’t have the words. “I glanced at Eli. He had two spots of pink on his cheeks, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from the run or the heat. “He’ll probably never want to run with me again.” (178-179) Eli proves a little more resilient than that, but point given and taken. It would be better if women didn’t feel so shy about mentioning their period, and I think men are always a little curious how it works. But there are limits. You can’t expect females to talk about blood issuing from a place males only see when in a sexual relationship, and expect the guys not to blush. And, however much the monthly event is lionized by feminists, Victoria’s body reminds her, it makes her feel kind of gross. Even this does not exhaust all the issues Victoria confronts herein, as she grows into womanhood. Another big one is makeup: is she a good feminist if she likes makeup? Her mom’s second job is hawking Avon, and she loves experimenting with cosmetics at sleepovers with her only close friend, Sarah. Toalson has Victoria write several free verse poems, and by far my favorite, “The Confusing Thing About Makeup” (83-85), I’ve reproduced in full. Never seen it so well said! I wish feminism had won out on this one. Do we get a happy ending? As Toalson says in the Author’s Note, Something Maybe Magnificent is based on her own hostility to the good man, thanked in the opening dedication and Acknowledgments, who became her and her two siblings’ stepfather after their birth dad walked out. And the author herself, for all her continued identification as a feminist, is married, and has given her husband a remarkable brood of six, all boys! Atypical and iconoclastic. I look forward to a third chronicle of Victoria Reeves—even if I must buy it unlike the first two that I found free—yet am at pains seeing how the author sees her place in the publishing world. In a recent blog post, in addition to understandably griping about AI used to churn out standardized litslop, she shows her good standing on the left by complaining about “book bans”. https://www.racheltoalson.com/whats-it-like-being-an-author-for-children-heres-a-peek/ Which of course do not mean books really being banned, just not promoted at libraries when they are recognized as smut, or otherwise harmful or of little value. Most importantly though, it should be stressed, Toalson’s are worthy literary productions, which I can’t imagine my fellow Rightists ever wishing to restrict. As I’ve established, even with her opinions, she is too good a writer not to leave hints to her own worldview’s shortcomings. She says something revealing here: “In this economy, people don’t have as much money to buy books. Libraries are losing funding. For middle grade, picture book, and many young adult authors, libraries are our biggest customers. Bookstores are struggling. Everyone’s struggling. What a mess.” Libraries are their biggest customers! There is something rent-seeking about insisting these public institutions have a duty to pony up, and subsidize authors with progressive left ideas, rather than fill their shelves with less offensive titles. Does the government owe them a living? Anyway, the Victoria Reeves books hardly mention LGBT, and never race that I recall. If Toalson ever wants to come over to the light side, she could recognize the “book bans” as removing much inferior competition. But she says something else, alarming but not surprising, about the publishing industry. “Kids, everyone’s saying (who knows who the experts are; authors just see all the statistics tossed around) aren’t picking up books anymore. So publishers are calling for shorter books, books that have exciting premises, books that are action action action action action (take a breath) action. “Many of my colleagues, who have written beautiful, brilliant books, are seeing those books rejected on a regular basis because they’re ‘too quiet,’ ‘kids just aren’t reading these kinds of books anymore,’ ‘we need something more commercial.’ I’ve had so many of my own stories rejected that I’m seriously considering not just changing genres and age groups but changing careers entirely… I’m exhausted. I need to make money at this...” Stay strong, Rachel Toalson! You write beautifully, and the middle grade genre would be the poorer without your more reflective and ponderous books. #RLToalson #RachelToalson #SomethingMaybeMagnificent #SvetlaRadivoeva #remarriage #stepfather #stepdad #fatherwound #feminism #menstruation #period #makeup #cosmetics #womanhood #selfrespect #middlegrade #childrensliterature #childrensbooks #literature #books