Unfortunately good books.

[rivka]

I read until 1:30am, last night. Didn't sleep very well, mostly because the no-sleeping-on-your-back thing is killing me. And then Alex woke up at 6:30am with a nightmare and neither one of us got back to sleep.

I am so tired.

I'm reading a YA book called Long May She Reign, by Ellen Emerson White. I picked it up on impulse because the girl on the cover was wearing a Williams sweatshirt, and then the back cover description was intriguing, and then suddenly it was 1am and I knew I was hurting myself by staying up so late and I still couldn't stop myself from sucking down one more chapter. And one more after that. And one more after that.

The book is about the eighteen-year-old daughter of the first female President of the United States. A few months before the book starts, Meg was kidnapped by terrorists, beaten, starved, and left for dead in an abandoned mine shaft. She had to crush her own hand to escape, and then wander out of the woods under her own power. With a smashed knee. Now she is permanently disabled, in crippling pain, and suffering from PTSD - all under the harsh spotlight of relentless public attention. And her family is privately falling apart from the strain, in large part due to her mother the President's public statement, while she was missing, that she "can not, have not, and will not negotiate with terrorists."

It's painfully real - so much so that tears kept leaking out of my eyes while I read. White doesn't go for simplistic. Meg is unbelievably damaged and spilling over with bottled-up fury, and yet she's also someone who has been trained for years to be poised and careful and consider the political implications of every word and facial expression. Her feelings sort of leak out sideways instead of erupting in scenery-chewing melodrama. White sticks to a tight third-person perspective, but shows how Meg's judgments and perceptions are warped by her experiences, both in ways she recognizes (she can pinpoint what stimuli trigger a panic attack, for example) and in ways she doesn't recognize (she resents the hovering White House servants, but is completely oblivious to how much she simultaneously depends on them and takes them for granted, even after she goes away to college and can't meet her basic needs without them).

When I was first reading the book, I kept thinking how interesting (although not unique, I know) it was to write an entire book about the aftermath of a trauma, with only bits and pieces of the kidnapping, and Meg's life before the kidnapping, slipped in retrospectively. Then, uh, I flipped to the back cover to read "about the author" and learned that this book is the fourth in a series. So never mind. White does a great job with inclueing all the same - obviously, given that I couldn't tell that I had missed earlier books.

Anyway. It's a really good book. And I don't know how I'm going to tolerate another 430 pages of it, because it just hurts that much.

Comments

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Yay for YA! :)

I think I read the first book a long time ago, in which Meg's mother is campaigning (I think). I knew there was one with a kidnapping too, and I vaguely knew there was a Williams connection somewhere. I am All About the YA Books these days, so I'll have to look for these.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Aaaaand..... our library doesn't have them, so I've placed a hold on another library's copy of the first one. Gotta start at the beginning. ;)

[naomikritzer]

Yeah, I read both the book about the campaign, and then the book about the kidnapping. I don't remember the first one so much, but the scene in which Meg smashes her own hand with a rock to free herself is etched permanently into my memory. I read this book as a young teen, and when there was a big news story a few years ago about a hiker/rock climber who amputated his own leg to free himself from a rock that had fallen on him, I IMMEDIATELY thought of the scene in that book.

Even if it's not the first in the series, it's very cool that the author wrote a whole book about the aftermath -- so often, when the person is physically safe again, it's the end of the story and the physical and emotional recovery is never discussed.

[eeyorerin]

Oh, wow, I read the first three as an adolescent, and now I am wanting to read this fourth one but wondering if perhaps I should wait a little.

They were really amazing books for me as an adolescent.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Holy crap, are they that old? ... Wow, I guess they are. It looks like they've been reissued, though - I wonder if the new edition has been updated. This one that I'm reading includes stuff like a natural assumption that if you're the President's daughter someone has probably Photoshopped porn pictures of you and slapped them up on the web.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Oh no, that might mean they've updated the culture references.

So glad I still have my battered copies from the late 80s.

ETA: Dammit. They did. Um, I recommend getting used copies of the original versions of the first three books!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a hard choice. Long May She Reign was published in 2007, so she either had to write it as a period piece, or go back and update the others. I think it would've been hard to write the last book as if she (um, the author, not Meg) didn't know what she knows now. but of course I don't have a beloved memory to be sullied.

[eeyorerin]

Hm. I don't know how I feel about the re-issuing but on the other hand, it is good to see them getting a new audience. But I did love them; I know I checked them out from the library several times. The scene in the cave in the third book where she finally decides to crush her hand, oh Lord, I can still recall it. I think that's what drew me to them over and over again -- things didn't get magically fixed or all better, but she (and her mother, who also suffers peril in another book) did survive and endure, which was better than magical sparkly endings for me.

I wonder why the gap of so many years? Maybe the first three didn't sell well.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I wonder why the gap of so many years? Maybe the first three didn't sell well.

I wonder if there's a maturational element. She says on her website that she started writing the first one in high school. I wonder if twenty extra years of life experience convinced her that the story of the aftermath was as important as the story of the drama.

Kind of like Ursula LeGuin going back and writing Tehanu howevermany years after writing the original Earthsea Trilogy, because she became convinced that she'd left important things and perspectives out of the world.

[kate_nepveu]

Eek, are you already on no-sleeping-on-your-back? How time does fly. (Then again, I may have gone unusually long in being comfortable sleeping that way.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I'll be 20 weeks on Tuesday.

I think I would probably still be comfortable sleeping on my back, but my midwife told me to stop. Alas. I can't remember what combination of pillows made this comfortable.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

No idea if it will help you, but since my chiropractor last nagged me I've added a memory foam topper to our bed, switched to a memory foam neck pillow for my head, and re-acclimated to a big fluffy pillow between my knees. This seems to work very well for sleeping on my side without flipping over.

[kate_nepveu]

Almost halfway there! Go, Niblet!

Good luck on figuring out the pillows.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Oh! You're reading MEG!

I read the first book in the series - The President's Daughter - when it came out in 1986? 1987? White House Autumn was next, the following year, and I didn't discover Long Live the Queen, which is the kidnapping book, until maybe 1999 or even 2000. It was before 9/11, I remember that much.

I strongly recommend reading the other books - and giving them to Alex when she is 12 or 13, because they're fantastic. The story is dynamic and wonderful and you only have to explain Hill Street Blues once or twice for her to understand some of the very 80s cultural touchpoints.

[minnaleigh.livejournal.com]

I read that book back in April and it is very good but very upsetting!!

Unlike a lot of people, I never read the series when I was a kid. I read the first three last summer so my wait for the post-kidnapping follow-up story was relatively short.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking of you while I'm reading it. Meg's relationship with her Secret Service detail keeps reminding me of your interest in Gina Toscano.

I should've expected that you would know about it already, given that you're the queen of YA.

[ailbhe]

Sounds good, like I shouldn't read it.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I read the first one or two years ago, while visiting relatives -- they were my cousin's. I remember enjoying it/them (can't remember if I only read one, or if she had both); I'll have to keep an eye out at the used book stores.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Huh, I didn't even know there was a fourth one!

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Me neither!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Everyone knows this series but me, don't they?

The fourth book wasn't published until 2007, so... eighteen years after the others? And YA, which is not a category most of us keep up with.

[selki.livejournal.com]

I had never heard of this series.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Possibly, but I didn't know about the fourth book either, and now I *want* it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Get ready to cry a lot. Although possibly some of that is hormones, in my case.