Claudia Grossman

What is the "fairy tale for women" in the full title? None of this is a faery tale. It doesn't follow the structures or the themes. Why only women? That makes the author sound kinda...moving on. This was boring! So boring that there is nothing to spoil. This whole book is a tourist ad for San Francisco. I kept having to look up what turned out to be landmarks and touristy things, thinking they were somehow important to the nonexistent plot. The way things were described in this book, I kept having to look up as well. Mostly clothing, but considering one of the characters was a jewelry designer, I did want to know. If she likes mermaids so much, how come she's such a big fan of pearls? Pearls are awful! If she'd mentioned lab-made, fine. But she kept going on about her buyer going to East Asia, which hints that they are not lab-made! And she likes diamonds too! No mention of them being lab-made or conflict-free, either! East Asians in general are exoticised, and there's at least two Magical Minority trope characters. One even has unusually blue eyes, which makes me think of "Memoirs of a Geisha." Sigh. Less than one percent of this book, which has "mermaid" in the title, is actually about mermaids. There's whole pages dedicated to fashion that suggests mermaid designs if you stare at it really hard, art depicting mermaids, but no actual mermaids unless you count the weird little asides where East Asian women play mah-jong. Even then, mah-jong is poorly described and it's just an excuse for exposition. The book is about clothing, clothing, cooking, tourism, and two other stories within the book that served no purpose except to pad out pages. The dreams each woman had would have been waaaay more interesting had they actually been experienced on the page and not just mentioned the next day.

If the two women live in San Francisco and have done so for a period of years, why are they going on a tourist trip like it's their first time there? If they were showing someone around, that would be absolutely fine. But they're not. This book would have been more interesting if one of them worked as a tour guide as a second job. Or even have a minor character do it, thus strengthening relationships between each and widening the book's scope a little. The structure of the book and some of the dialogue makes the book seem like it's trying to be a mystery, but it's just a heavy-handed tourism ad. Each chapter was really just a short story. None of them connected to one another, although many had similar themes. The prose was purple in a way that didn't work.

I keep mentioning this was a tourist ad for San Francisco. I had the same problem with "Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You' by Berthe DeClements. It was a tourism ad for Seattle, Washington, where I live, and some smaller towns I'm also familiar with: Lynnwood and Everett. The tourism ad that consisted of over half that book annoyed me, too. There's no story. Can we move on and have one now? is what I ask of both books, and with both of these, the answer is clearly no.
Sigh.… (altro)