… it’s set during the same period as the first book, so I thought I’d be okay since I’d already been there. But this one hits even closer to home. Where Life was set in a remote town in Pennsylvania, The Dead & the Gone is set in New York City. Here’s one of the points where my heart stopped: “The mandatory evacuation of the Borough of Queens will begin on Saturday. All municipal services will end by Friday, July first.”Meanwhile, I finally watched The Princess Bride for the first time–I’d read and loved the book in college, but hadn’t seen the movie all the way through.
I still love much of what the story was trying to do, but … I suspect the movie version of Buttercup, the stories female lead, would have gone down much better in the eighties. Then, I might only have seen someone holding on to her belief in true love and its power to conquer all; now, I kept screaming at her to do something. True love may indeed conquer all, but that doesn’t mean letting the object of that true love do all the fighting and strategizing, while you stand anxiously by and do nothing.
After two weeks chasing down the homeplaces of women such as Hallgerður Höskuldsdóttir and Guðrun Osvifssdóttir, it’s hard to come home to passive Buttercup, who cannot bring herself to so much as hit a giant rat (rodent of unusual size) with a stick when it’s going for her true love’s throat. Fortunately, we really have gained some ground since the 80s (with thanks one more to Buffy, and Keladry, and countless others), even if there still is much ground left to gain. (And yes, I know Buttercup was an improvement over the 50s, and 60s, and 70s, but that fact offers less comfort.)