We are traipsing through the land of Kyria this week on our unnecessarily teeny tiny feet as we revisit Gail Carson Levine's Newbery Honor book Ella Enchanted. Poor Ella of Frell has been cursed with the "gift" of obedience in this reimagining of the Cinderella story. We try to decipher the moral of the story, debate the rules and regulations of "small magic," and rue that Ella is really lacking in wokeness. Teresa laments the Shrekification of Ella Enchanted in the movie adaptation of the book, and we explore the not-like-other-girls trope, which leads to a startling not-like-other-girls declaration from Marisa.
These Books Made Me is a podcast about the literary heroines who shaped us and is a product of the Prince George's County Memorial Library System podcast network. Stay in touch with us via Twitter @PGCMLS with #TheseBooksMadeMe or by email at TheseBooksMadeMe@pgcmls.info. For recommended readalikes and deep dives into topics related to each episode, visit out blog at https://pgcmls.medium.com/.
We mentioned a lot of topics in this episode. Here's a brief list of some of them if you want to do your own further research:
Gail Carson Levine talks to Cynthia Leitich Smith: https://cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit-resources/read/authors/interviews/gailcarsonlevine/
Issues in adaptation: https://screenrant.com/ella-enchanted-film-book-comparison/
Fairytale retellings: https://bookriot.com/fairytale-retellings/
We are traipsing through the land of Kyria this week on our unnecessarily teeny tiny feet as we revisit Gail Carson Levine's Newbery Honor book Ella Enchanted. Poor Ella of Frell has been cursed with the "gift" of obedience in this reimagining of the Cinderella story. We try to decipher the moral of the story, debate the rules and regulations of "small magic," and rue that Ella is really lacking in wokeness. Teresa laments the Shrekification of Ella Enchanted in the movie adaptation of the book, and we explore the not-like-other-girls trope, which leads to a startling not-like-other-girls declaration from Marisa.
These Books Made Me is a podcast about the literary heroines who shaped us and is a product of the Prince George's County Memorial Library System podcast network. Stay in touch with us via Twitter @PGCMLS with #TheseBooksMadeMe or by email at TheseBooksMadeMe@pgcmls.info. For recommended readalikes and deep dives into topics related to each episode, visit out blog at https://pgcmls.medium.com/.
We mentioned a lot of topics in this episode. Here's a brief list of some of them if you want to do your own further research:
Gail Carson Levine talks to Cynthia Leitich Smith: https://cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit-resources/read/authors/interviews/gailcarsonlevine/
Issues in adaptation: https://screenrant.com/ella-enchanted-film-book-comparison/
Fairytale retellings: https://bookriot.com/fairytale-retellings/
Do we get to answer this question ourselves?
Speaker 2:You can if you want. It will probably not get put in, but go for
Speaker 1:It. Okay. I would just absolutely forget everyone important and what their titles are. It would be very disrespectful. That's
Speaker 3:Fair. For me, if I were in Ella Enchanted, the giveaway would be that I'm overweight.
Speaker 1:I'm
Speaker 2:Sorry,<laugh>. I would just spill something immediate. I spill everything.
Speaker 3:Spill something.
Speaker 1:Cause you're clumsy. Not like the other girls.
Speaker 2:Not like the other girls.
Speaker 3:I'm not like other girls. I'm disgusting.
Speaker 4:<laugh>.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Heather and this is our podcast he's booked, Made me. Today we're going to be talking about Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. Friendly warning. As always, this podcast contains spoilers. If you don't yet know who hates having hair in their soup, proceed with caution. We have two special guests with us this week. Could you introduce yourself?
Speaker 3:Hi, my name's Maa. I'm a librarian in the north area, a big fan of technology and a notorious chatter box. So I'm looking forward to this.
Speaker 1:I'm Therea, I'm a librarian in our central area and this is my second time on the podcast, so I'm excited.
Speaker 3:So Theresa, I'm gonna shoot this to you here. What did this book mean to you, either growing up or you know, as becoming a librarian?
Speaker 1:So, I read this the first time when I was probably in elementary school. Fairy tale retellings were like my bread and butter. I devoured these. So this was probably one of the first ones of that sort of genre that I read. And it's definitely one that's like stuck around in my memory, rereading it this time. Like there's some places that are a bit either haven't aged well or maybe weren't like the strongest storytelling, but there's still a lot holds up. I, I'm holding the 20th edition or 20th anniversary edition in my hands. Like there's, there's a reason it's still around and people are still reading it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think anything that's fairytale retellings, it just seems like we always love them. Yeah.<laugh> like I can remember growing up and watching Rocky and Bull Winks, fractured fairy tales. I loved it. So when I read this for the first time, I think I was 10 years old and I remember that it just really sucked me in to the point where I think I still knew the first line of the book that full of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to place a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift. It's a, and that's just such a good opening and it stuck with me. My first impression upon rereading it was, she's a lot older than I thought she was when I first read it. Cause when I was reading through it, I thought she was like 11 or 12. And then what? She's 17, 16 going on 17
Speaker 1:At the end. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely reads a little bit younger and it makes sense cause it is like for a younger audience. This is in our juvenile collection. Yeah. But I honestly think she's that old canonically just so she can get married at the end. Like she feels like a younger character that younger readers can connect with.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But also 16 year olds getting married or
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Fairy tale times.
Speaker 3:<laugh>. We would like to go on the record and say that we do not condo on that behavior.<laugh>.
Speaker 2:So I think I'm the outlier here because I read this book as an adult. I did not read it as a child and I read it in the context of being a mom of daughters. I did not retain a lot of this book though. This seems to be a theme for me that if I don't reread a book many, many times, much of it doesn't stick. Yeah. I don't know. I remember liking it the first time I read it. I'm not sure how well it holds up now. Again, like there said, it's, it's not a current book.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely some sections upon rereading. I kind of sat here as an adult and went, okay. Like I could feel myself physically cringing.
Speaker 1:Uh, maybe I can go ahead with our plot summary real quick and then we can dive in. At her birth, Ella of Fre received a foolish fair's gift, The Gift of Obedience. Ella must obey any order, whether it's hopping on one foot for a day and a half, or chopping off her own head. But strong-willed Ella does not accept her fate against a bold backdrop of princes, ogres giants, wicked stepsisters and fairy godmothers. Ella goes on a quest to break the curse forever.
Speaker 2:And Marisa, I think you've got an author bio for us.
Speaker 3:Yes indeed I do. Gail Carson Levine was born and raised in New York City and born on September 17th, 1947. Her parents were David and Sylvia Carson and Gail was the second of their two daughters. Both Gail and her sister grew up in a home that valued books and reading and encouraged creativity of all sorts. Gail grew up with the dream of becoming a painter and writing as a career wasn't initially in her sight. Although she participated in writing activities in high school. She also enjoyed acting and even started an acting troupe with her friends in high school. That performed at local nursing homes in college, initially Antioch and Yellow Spring, Ohio. Then City College of New York. Levine majored in philosophy and after graduation took a job working to help welfare recipients at the New York State Department of Labor and Department of Social Services. In 1967, she married David Levine, a software develop developer, but himself also a creative person As a pianist and photographer, Gail Carson Levine would work for the New York Department of Labor and Social Services for close to 30 years. She says that she found the earlier work that involved directly helping people, more rewarding to the administrative side that she came to. Later in her career, Levine would keep up her creative life, mostly through her painting. But by the late 1980s, she would come to realize that she was interested in a new career that of a children's author. She endured nearly a decade of rejection before her first novel. Ella Enchanted was published in 1997. The following year it won the Newberry Medal. Levine has been writing children's and young adult books, many with fairytale themes ever since.
Speaker 2:Let dive right into the book. Start out with the million dollar question. How does this book hold up? Like Theresa mentioned, it's a little bit older, it was written in 97. How does this book work for us? That's kind of where I'm at. Explain that sound though. Maa,
Speaker 3:Like some of it aged like wine, some of it aged like milk<laugh> especially. There was this constant theme of good people are small and petite and Ella has the world's smallest feet. Did you know she actually needs help to walk away? She doesn't because she has a gift of obedience and people who are bad or not entirely human are large. Like the first thing we hear about about her like stepmom, which by the way her name is Olga. Olga is like the classic Villainist name. Like if you told me someone was named Olga and she wasn't the wicked stepmother, I'd be like, she's gonna cause problems. Two chapters in. The first thing we hear is that she has like a kind of ugly face and she's overweight. And there's a part of me that reads this in 2022 and goes, I don't like that. Yeah, I don't like that in general. I don't like that. As someone who's chubby, it doesn't age well. It just doesn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a lot of fat shaming in general in this book. Like you mentioned the stepmother, but we also have pages and pages of olive eating and it's a very negative thing that's very telling about her character. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So, you know, she's depicted as gluttonous and greedy. She hoards money. Um, she's slow and dimwitted and, and stupid hats also presented as large and not attractive just like her mom that I, I think basically the only character that's of size that's depicted in a positive way at all is Mandy. But even that, I feel like she's frequently very negative in terms of her descriptors of Mandy. It's almost like she's good in spite of looking frumpy and plump. And
Speaker 1:I don't know if I read it as in spite of, but it definitely was like still playing into a trope of like the cozy, simple house
Speaker 2:Made.
Speaker 3:And that's so funny to me. That's like, oh you are a wonderful person in spite of your hair, your teeth, your nose, your overall size, your body odor, and you know that extra toe that you have. Because Ella's whole thing is she's not like other girls. She's clumsy and sometimes talks out of turn, slides
Speaker 2:Down, banisters,
Speaker 3:<laugh>. But it's interesting that when Ella does something outside of the norms, it's fine. But if someone of size does something, it's immediately considered bad and questionable. I don't wanna live in that world. I don't wanna be in that world. There
Speaker 1:Was one part at the end, this is not to dispute anything you said because you're, you're both spawn. But there was one example of largeness in a positive light that I did appreciate at the very end in the description of the queen. I'm gonna see if I can find it. Um,
Speaker 2:Oh, she has a broad face. Yeah.
Speaker 1:A wide face to accommodate a wide smile. And I thought that was a nice breath of fresh air in the midst of what's a very consistent targeting of appearance and associating certain traits with someone's character.
Speaker 3:True, true.
Speaker 2:I also just During the, I guess this is fantasy, so clearly this isn't a real world or a real time period, but I think it is meant to echo sort of historical time periods. You can sort of place it by what's valued the monarchy, the, the things they have at their disposal in terms of tools and such. And I have to say, I feel like it probably wouldn't have been a negative to have some meat on your bones then mm-hmm.<affirmative> because it would indicate that you were fed and that you were of means. And yeah. So that was a little bit odd to me as well because I'm not sure that, I'm not sure that's consistent with the world that the author is building to depict eating and having an appetite as being like a negative thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like with all of wanting a a cake at every, every meal. Yeah. The nobility would totally have been doing that.<laugh> sounds like a great time.
Speaker 3:<laugh>. I do have a somewhat related question. Did we figure out exactly when and where frl is supposed to be? I ask because we're talking about food and one of my personal pet peeves is when you get like medieval early modern and there's potatoes
Speaker 1:And corn like and Turkey. No<laugh>
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Were there potatoes in this book? Cause I feel like that tends to get kind of depicted as like the default peasant food.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:Not, I don't know. The food is not well described in this book. We've had some other books where the authors have clearly taken a lot of pleasure in describing the decadence of certain foods. Really the only foods that we get a whole lot of descriptor on are the things that Mandy makes that have some element of magic to them. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:<affirmative> unicorn
Speaker 2:Hair, the unicorn hair tonic. There's, um, the one soup that is described, and I think that was Carrot. She said she picked them at like their peak sweetness. Mandy's a cook. She's got Ella working in a kitchen with her, but there's not a whole lot of real descriptors about the food. It's just like she's mixing this for a cake, but what kind of a cake? What? So I'm not, I'm not sure we've got a lot on the food, but I do just generally, I'm not sure what the time period was. I think I felt it was like maybe medieval Theresa. I think you were thinking it was like Elizabeth in times.
Speaker 1:Well there there's one reference to um, olive's. They call it her stomach role. It's like the, um, she's hiding her coins in the stuffing of the stomach role. And that was a piece that in Elizabeth in times it would be worn under the skirt to kind of hold it away from the body. But then the later her ball gown is described as having like a large bow in the back, which I, I'm not an expert in historical costuming. I dabble, but I don't think that was a thing it like in congruent style. So I, I'm pretty sure it's just generic fantasy, like Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I feel like this book is very impressionistic where it's more about the feeling and the experience than it is about any material accuracy. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. But I think that's why kids like it. I think that's one of the reasons why it's so enduring. You can get into this character's head and kind of see things from her perspective. And because Ella is, you know, only a 16 year old, she probably isn't going to notice all of these great details of what's around her. And it's written in a way that's very accessible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And is that
Speaker 3:Bug, is it a feature? I don't know. And
Speaker 1:Unless you're going like all in on the food, like the Red Bull books, do most descriptions of food are gonna be boring and not really super plot relevant? Yeah,
Speaker 2:I think there's not a ton of world building in this book. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> for as long as it is. You know, this is not a super spare book as far as children's books go. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, it's, you know, it's not like a hundred page novella kind of thing. It's fairly substantial as a children's book, but most of this space is dedicated to what Ella's thinking or, you know, her interactions. A lot of dialogue in this book, but not a ton of fleshing out of the worlds around her. We do get a ton of other languages that different beings in the world speak or that, uh, different part of the kingdom speaks beyond that. It, it didn't seem like she was super interested in like, fleshing out the economy of this world or who's who in, in the Lords and ladies in monarchy or what, you know, what's actually happening at these balls or feast. It's very broad strokes. It's like there's dancing and then someone's gonna sing a song and like at finishing school you're gonna embroider some stuff and then you're gonna learn some languages. There's just not a lot of depth to the descriptions in the book. I feel like it's more character driven than world or plot driven.
Speaker 3:I would've appreciated a little more context. Just I would've cause it's a fantasy. But I also think that's because I'm an adult now. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> and those things now matter to me as a reader. 10 year old me didn't care.
Speaker 1:Exactly. That's what I was gonna say too. Like, I was fully engrossed in this book when I read it because I was in Ella's head with her and that's what I enjoyed. I did not care. I, I would've enjoyed a map probably since she travels. I always love a good map in a fantasy novel. But, um, other than that I was perfectly content as a child reader with the information she provided. It was generic fantasy. You could imagine the, you know, wonderful gowns everyone was wearing without having to read a couple pages of the descriptions.
Speaker 2:I think in keeping with the generic fantasy bit, there are also some other really common tropes from children's literature that we see in here. Her mom dies, which we see the
Speaker 3:Spoilers. Her mom's dead
Speaker 2:<laugh>. Thanks. Sorry if you made it this far. Her mom is no longer with us. Um, she dies very early on in the book. Orphaned children are sort of a staple of fairy tales in children's literature. Yeah. Cuz it frees them up to have adventures. And then we also have the boarding school type of thing with her going to finishing school. So being sent away from home in this period of independence of some sort and like having to learn about yourself.
Speaker 3:Well I guess to some extent the first thing I think of is if you're being sent away to a school to be educated in really anything, it could be manners, foreign languages or underwater basket weaving. For all I care it's an indication of wealth and means it makes sense why we have Olga, the gold digger who wants to marry the widower and have access to those means.
Speaker 2:Well and her dad is completely financially obsessed to the point of being very dishonest and a pretty sketchy guy with his merchant career, but he's very fixated on monetary gain. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> and, you know, he, he ships her off to boarding school even less because it's like a symbol of status and more because it improves her odds of landing a rich husband, which then improved his bank account.
Speaker 1:<laugh> Ella's connection to class is really interesting because like she spends so much time when she's young and then when she gets back from school in the kitchens just working alongside of the staff. But she's also a member of a family that has staff and part of her whole like, not like the other girl's trope I think is related to class that like the other girls that she's not like are rich and stuck up about it. So there is, she feels some distance from that but then when it comes down to it and she's like being mistreated by her step family, forced to live in the servants quarters where it's so awful she would never want to live, have to live there ever again. But she doesn't do a whole lot of reflecting on like how her friends have been living in servants quarters. Can we talk the whole time?
Speaker 2:And then when she has the chance to sort elevate everybody with her, when she marries the prince, she just puts them in charge of other servants. She doesn't actually do anything to
Speaker 1:Improve
Speaker 3:Conditions promoting you to servant supervisor. Right.
Speaker 1:She is like above the people who are obsessed with wealth because she just doesn't think about it. Which means she doesn't do anything about the inequality. It causes and is just complicit and very supreme. It doesn't change
Speaker 3:Anything. Ella is not woke. We would like to go on record and say that
Speaker 1:She's not straight at all.
Speaker 3:<laugh>. It's so funny though because she's doing all of this manual labor and I feel like because she
Speaker 2:Learns nothing from
Speaker 3:It, she's like, man sucks to be a servant by guys and then just walks
Speaker 2:Away. Right. There's never a, there's never a moment where she's like, this is awful. My hands are bleeding from using lie on the floor.<laugh>, maybe we shouldn't have servants using lie on the floor. It's nothing ever clicked for her. She's
Speaker 1:Like, they're fair.
Speaker 2:This, this is bad for me.
Speaker 1:I do think there is supposed to be like, well she's getting like the extra bad treatment because her fam her step family doesn't like her. But again, like no, no examination of like, someone would still have to do this job. Yeah. If
Speaker 2:It wasn't me. Yeah. Someone scrubbing the floor even if it's not her.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean the narrative pretty much says from, you know, the wealthy standpoint meaning, you know, Olga and the stepsisters. The worst thing that we can possibly think of for you is to have you scrubbing the floors. Like all of these people
Speaker 2:Working in the kitchen and Yeah. And
Speaker 1:Be seen by the, by the nobility in your rags and covered with their Well
Speaker 2:And it also is odd too because, so the dirt thing, and I know this is part of it being a, a twist on the Cinderella story and none of the other servants are filthy<laugh>. Like why
Speaker 3:She role
Speaker 1:Anymore So she doesn't face herself, they're
Speaker 3:Professional servants. She's in there on an unpaid internship. Like
Speaker 2:They, they describe her and she looks like a chimney sweep and no one else in the book is described as being filthy
Speaker 3:Cause they've been doing it for years. They know how to handle it.
Speaker 1:Shirley Mandy could use some small magic and just like freshen her up a bit.
Speaker 2:<laugh> tidy up up the face a
Speaker 3:Little bit. Nah.
Speaker 2:When she's getting ready for the ball and she gets in a bathtub, she acts like she hasn't washed, had a bath in this entire time ever.
Speaker 3:What is this magic you've done ma? It's soap, you know, it's that.
Speaker 2:It's just warm water and soap bringing up Mandy and her small magic. Uh, I think we need to talk about what small magic is.
Speaker 3:That's wonderful. And what
Speaker 2:Big magic is. Cause this is, I will be honest, this bothered me almost as much as anything else in the book. And I do think the book is fun and I think that it's, I get why people enjoy reading this as a child. It's fun. It has some likable characters in it, but there's so many things in this book that just are not consistent. And the magic thing really gets me because the context is that Mandy is a fairy and in this world, fairies seem to have fairly unlimited magical powers. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, they can do all manner of things, but they choose not to because big magic has ripple effects. Right. So there's this whole notion of a butterfly effect that if you do something big, it changes everything going out. And I think that the example that Mandy initially gives to Ella is, no, I can't make it stop raining. Think about what would happen if I did that. And she says, Oh, well then someone's crops may not grow. Oh it may cause a drought. She goes along with that and says, Yes, that's exactly right. That would be big magic because it has all of these impacts. But this whole story basically kicks off because Ella's mom dies and like, while they are both sick, Mandy gives them a soup with unicorn hair in it, which Ella drinks and it saves her life. The mother refuses to drink the unicorn hair because I guess she's too good to drink a hair in her soup and dies because of it. This seems like big life saving magic seems big to me. So like the ripple effects of the mom dying are huge. They are the whole book.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Everything that happens essentially happens because of that catalyst of an event. And Mandy was like, No, but small magic brewing, a life saving soup. You know, that's fine. But I can't put this vase back together after it breaks on the ground. I can just magic the pieces into the trash. Like I just could not track the rules of magic in this world at all. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:<affirmative>, I feel like it maybe has to do with the number of people affected. That's the only logic I can find where it's like, okay, I can help one person, but if I do something that affects more people, then we have a problem. But then again, I'm pretty sure if you have an alive mom as opposed to a dead mom,
Speaker 1:That's gonna have profound effects on several people.
Speaker 2:And I think it would've actually impacted fewer people had she, like I, so she lets her die
Speaker 1:<laugh>
Speaker 2:After, even though she tries to save her. But then that ends up affecting either direction that would affect the whole kingdom because the whole romance between Char and Ella wouldn't have gone the way that it went if her mom hadn't done
Speaker 1:<laugh>. I've made some small justification for myself that only very weekly holds up that it's because it was the mom's choice whether or not to drink it. Like Mandy made it available, but she didn't like touch her forehead and cure her. I it's still life saving potion. Uh, you know, uh, but maybe that's how Mandy justified it in her mind. I don't know. You couldn't tell her to make sure she, you know, really appreciate special sauce. Like, like what?
Speaker 2:Like she could potentially save someone's life, but she can't give Ella a dang umbrella. Like
Speaker 1:I, what is this<laugh> I,
Speaker 2:The scale is very confusing
Speaker 1:To me. There, there must be some backstory with the fairies because they, everyone except Lucinda is so traumatized, like so afraid of what will happen. I feel like there must have been like some dark stuff that went down a couple centuries ago, but everyone else has just kind of forgotten. Fairies are indirectly murdering people in this
Speaker 2:Book. Well they totally always
Speaker 1:<laugh>,
Speaker 2:But everyone but Lucinda, the of the fairies seem to be beloved and they're invited to all of these things,
Speaker 1:Things, but they're also like living in cowering in fear and not telling anyone that they're fairies and hiding their small feet. And like there's some, there's something that happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The whole fairy thing is a little odd to me. Yeah. But then lucinda's like poofing around, she's like
Speaker 1:Bother by that and
Speaker 2:Everyone's just like, Oh, that's so cool. A fairy. So like
Speaker 1:Hiding. I'm not saying current persecution, I mean like historical way back fairies were doing whatever they wanted. People got angry and tried to like wipe them all out or something. And now the remaining fairies have taken a vow. Is that why? That's what I think. Is that why obedience was a gift? Oh. Although Lucinda doesn't seem to have a great sense of her. Oh yeah, yeah. Trauma four boundaries.<laugh>. So I don't think the community trauma is what motivated the gift, but I dunno,
Speaker 2:I also was confused by the gifts because I thought the book was early on establishing that Lucinda knew exactly what she was doing when she gave these gifts that weren't really gifts to people. But then at the end that clearly wasn't the case
Speaker 1:Because she's fully clueless. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It just seems like she's oblivious. Yeah. But that was not how it read to me at the beginning really where it seemed very like passive aggressive gifting or
Speaker 1:I, I chose you to hate have this,
Speaker 2:Which would've been maybe more interesting if there was some history with the fairies. Like maybe
Speaker 3:Ms. Levine we're not saying the book as bad, we just say we need some context.
Speaker 1:It's a children's book. Like it's a children's book. I know. Worst
Speaker 2:The metaphors are very mixed because she did reference early in the book, Oh Like Sleeping Beauty. And she said, Well I don't have to go to sleep sort of thing. So like there was already a concept of like a bad fairy coming and like wrecking your stuff because whatever and giving you this curse. But then Luci is like ladi da. I didn't think out that turning someone into a squirrel was a problem.
Speaker 1:<laugh>
Speaker 3:What?
Speaker 1:Good
Speaker 3:Grief.
Speaker 1:I was totally fine suspending my disbelief for most of the fairy magic up until the point where reformed Lucinda and Mandy both refused to take off the obedience curse. Like Lucinda has realized big magic is a problem. She has realized it is screwing up people's lives and refuses to actually take responsibility for it. She's like, Oh, you're crying. I don't like looking at that. And literally like poofs off when she sees Ella having a hard time, it's at that point like, clean up your mess.
Speaker 2:Agree. That made no sense to me either. Like why is it huge magic to say, Oh, do over, I messed that up.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. The only thing I can think of is that if you're a child reading this adults with motives, you can't understand true. And deep context that you do not have is very relatable.
Speaker 1:I do remember that's a good point when reading it, like just the, the frustration of that moment, I felt so strongly internally, like it was impactful while reading it. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. I remember feeling frustrated in Ella's shoes. Absolutely. What do you mean? I have to
Speaker 1:Tiny shoes
Speaker 3:Perfectly and all this pain and you guys have seen how bad this is. Why won't you get rid of this?
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I, I do wanna talk about, um, people seeing how bad things are and then they just kinda keep doing it.<laugh>. So the other thing I, there's real issues with some of the treatment of non-human characters in
Speaker 1:The Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it sometimes seems to be acknowledged as like, oh, this is problematic, but then it just keeps going.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The big one is definitely the zoo. Yeah. Which, if you haven't read the book, just hearing that there's a, a zoo for non-human creatures that are sentient, like should raise a lot of red flags.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah. An entire forest of them.
Speaker 2:Well and, and even, yeah, so the zoo, even beyond the zoo, there's just so many examples of what seemed to be huge groups of non-humans being othered to the point that they've been like removed and like kept away from everyone else.
Speaker 3:And what's weird to me is it almost feels like an accessory instead of something integral to the plot because it's never commented on.
Speaker 2:No, it's really not. I guess there's a little bit with the ogres when, so there's the point where Ella who bizarrely is able to acquire entire languages in like a day if she's exposed to them, is captured by ogres. Ogres come upon her and she uses their own language to sort of manipulate them. And then the prince and his men come and like tie up the ogres to take them away and capture them. And there is a moment in that scene where Ella kind of feels sorry for them, but then it's immediately ended and it's never commented on again. And, and you get these references later in the book to like, ah, great ogre catcher. Or like, yeah, we caught so many ogres like that, it's a great thing. But we have this brief flash of sort of empathy for them that just immediately evaporates and just doesn't show up again.
Speaker 3:It keeps happening. Wow. Being a servant's bad anyway. Wow.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's
Speaker 3:Just like, she's like, wow, these people are treated terribly. Oh wow. That's crazy. Then she sees the ogres, Oh wow. They're actually being oppressed and other and she's like, Wow, that's crazy. Anyway, I have a dance to attend.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:They, they have put her in situations where she is like shown to be better than a, than how a lot of people approach other beings. Like when she is staying with the elves and they're like, Your your dad sucks. We hate trading with him. You're really nice. We'll give you these like expensive gifts that are like super rare or how, you know, she's her friend at school gets like, you know, bullied and um, teased by the other girls because she's not from their kingdom. But then there's like these huge systemic things that she just doesn't notice or doesn't engage with. I mean, she's also a child surrounded by adults that are engaged. She's with it either but, um, 16 by the end, she's like 15 when her mom dies, I think. Okay.
Speaker 2:Well then there's also at the end when she gets married it says that she refused to be a princess.
Speaker 1:That was interesting.
Speaker 2:So it was like, okay, I assume this is like she's taking some sort of stand on principle, but then it didn't seem like she was, it was like she just refused the title to show that she didn't have to be obedient anymore. It didn't mean any,
Speaker 3:But since we're talking about like other groups, can I just bring up a little pet peeve of mine? They're like, Oh yeah, she learned languages really fast cuz she has a single drop of fairy blood. And as a mixed race person, that was a little, I had to like step back, put the book down, be like, all right, are we gonna have, is this a blood quantum thing? Are we, are we getting into weird racism in this book?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:Did they actually say the languages had anything to do with the fairy blood? I don't remember that connection
Speaker 2:Behind. I thought it was that the fairy blood, the little bit of fairy blood made her predisposed to be special at certain things.
Speaker 1:I was pretty sure that the fairy blood only came up to explain how she had tiny feet. I don't think it ever got into the
Speaker 2:Languages. I also thought like yeah, Marisa did that. It meant that she had a little bit of magic in her. And so I can double check.
Speaker 3:Actually the magic came in the tiny, tiny
Speaker 1:Too.
Speaker 3:You know, my,
Speaker 2:It's just the tiny feet. That's hilarious. But like<laugh>, you're, it's so inconsequential, but we have to bring it up to make the glass slippers make sense. Um,<laugh> they also talked about, cuz Mandy also said your mom did too, you know, like that you get this from your mom and her mom threw out the book is also the same sort of character where it's like she's not like the other ladies. You know, even the queen says that like, I used to have a friend that was free and wonderful and whatever, and she's like, I knew she was talking about my mom.
Speaker 1:There is
Speaker 2:Exist. That's the only person in the kingdom that that could be,
Speaker 1:There's only allowed to be one nice woman in the court at all times. There's
Speaker 2:Only one, only one special. Not like the other girls.
Speaker 3:I just love the, I love the idea that you find out that you're a descendant of a group of people known for having profound power and the ability to affect their space. And then the only thing you get is small feet
Speaker 1:<laugh>.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then like, I just also like, ah, that just seems like such an elaborate thing to spin to just account for why her feet are smaller than this. Just say she's small feet. Small feet. She's described as tiny anyways.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank goodness she's not that she's not heavy because this tiny feet, she wouldn't be able to move
Speaker 1:<laugh> if we're interested. Mandy does say that it doesn't give her any magic or longevity. Uh, it's just her feet. So
Speaker 3:What's the
Speaker 2:<laugh>? It really is just about the glass slippers then. But you could have just said she had small feet because they've also like described the step sisters as being, you know, in other ways physically much larger than her. Just say their feet are bigger. Wouldn't even try the shoes on like three people.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't even have any, have to have anything to do with size because the shoes don't come into the story until her and Char find them when they're like hanging out in an abandoned castle. So he should just know that she's the only one that has them. Like<laugh>, We don't have to choose the tiny feet thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's very odd. And it's not like this echoes the Cinderella story in which she tries them on every person in the kingdom. It's three people<laugh>. Yes.
Speaker 1:And he's already seen her face and like recognizes her. Yes. It's like she has nothing to do with it. Also
Speaker 2:Her alias is terrible. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well is it again? Lela Lela
Speaker 2:And she's Ella to Lela
Speaker 3:<laugh>. Lela
Speaker 1:<laugh>.
Speaker 2:It's like, this is like, your name is Bobby and you go with Robbie as you are like alias. This is not a significant
Speaker 1:Change
Speaker 2:To your name.
Speaker 3:That is a name you make up when you think you're going to be in trouble for something.
Speaker 1:<laugh>
Speaker 3:Like you get caught jaywalking or something. What's your name? Lela.
Speaker 1:She was clearly not making plans on the, on the coach ride over. That was on the spot port decision making.
Speaker 3:The boarding school. I would get a refund. The
Speaker 2:Coach ride over is also another throwaway thing. I feel like there's a lot of things in this book where like there were more pages that got edited out and things were important and then we just don't see how that plays out. And they forgot to edit the whole thing out because the coach being a pumpkin, so she has an orange coach and she's like, well that's just what we have in bass. Like, they're just orange and bass. This other like part of the kingdom where apparently the prince has never been. But then the queen says, I don't remember there being orange coaches and embarrassed and that's it. Nothing happens because of that. There's no epiphany. Like, Oh this girl is not who she says she is. She's not real. There's nothing, She's
Speaker 3:Just very fashionable.
Speaker 2:A throwaway line.<laugh> again
Speaker 1:Though, reading this as a kid, you don't know it. It was, it just seemed like a little joke. Like it, I wasn't reading that much into it. I was enjoying the queen being like, I didn't read that much into it.
Speaker 3:<laugh>. Which it seems like the queen always has like an insight and then nothing is commented on. I remember this wonderful woman, you know, just like friend of mine just like you, man. That's weird.
Speaker 1:<laugh>. Yeah, I will say like on my reread, I, I mean I I'm here with you on all this, but when I was just reading it this past couple weeks, I was not reading it very harshly. I was pulled right back in thoroughly enjoying it. Reading the part of the end where she breaks the curse. This time I, I think if I'd read it first as an adult, I would've thought it was kind of weak, honestly. Like the way that that happened. But reading it as a kid, it felt huge. Yes. I was, every single sentence I was feeling inside me and like, and when it finally breaks and she, he breaks the curse. I so much just like warped and joy and like epiphany kind of feelings and like it was a really good experience as a kid. Like
Speaker 2:You have agency. Yeah, I totally get that. I mean, what we read is so tied to when it's very rooted in the experience we had when we first read something. Absolutely. Yes. Whether it's bad or good. And it's really hard I think to really get that distance from it ever because it's, it's a full reading a book when you're a kid especially is a full sensory thing. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> or like, so I 100% get that and I feel like I'm being kind of a downer about this book just cause I've only read it as an adult and I, I will be honest, I don't recall when I read this at first thinking like, eh, what is this? You know? Or being like bothered by things. So some of it too I just think is we're reading it with a different lens mm-hmm.<affirmative> because we're trying to break it down. But when she breaks the curse. Okay. So it really bothered me cause the like take home seemed to be like, well a good man is what you really need. Because that was what,
Speaker 3:Sorry?
Speaker 2:What caused her bigger? It was like the love for herself, for love for Mandy. Her love for her family wasn't enough, but man, her, her love for that one good man, it pushed her through
Speaker 1:To, I felt like it was so much bigger than him. Cuz it wasn't just him, it was a whole kingdom. It was anyone. She married someone. Yeah. She but
Speaker 2:Selfless. But I just also, oh, I don't know. I
Speaker 3:Do have to say that when I first read it as a kid and I see that her evil stepmother, Olga, which again, evil name and her stepsister's still like, Yes, marry him. This is gonna be perfect. Love this. We're getting money, we're getting cakes every day. This is gonna be awesome. You can sit there and be trash, but this is excellent for us. And when she says no mm-hmm.<affirmative>, I remember just like jaw dropping as a kid. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Like, I think it's because when you're a little kid, especially if I ever told an adult in my life No. When I was 10, Yeah. Oh my, I I couldn't do it. I would be sent to my room<laugh>.
Speaker 1:And also like, she's, she's not just saying no to them, which is a huge part of it. She's also saying no to herself. Which I, I think what sets it apart from the other moments where she was forced to do stuff. She doesn't want to like, she wants to be with him. She, and you know, if the rest of her family benefits from it, whatever, like yeah. But it's something she deeply wants. So the internal struggle that's different from the other times, what sets us apart from the other times she's been in that kind of struggle is that she has to say there's already an internal struggle that's way bigger than the other times. Like she, she knows that she cannot given to what she wants or what other people are telling her to do. She's fighting herself and them.
Speaker 2:I know<laugh>,
Speaker 3:But it's
Speaker 2:Still about him. So I pulled up the page and this is what bothered me. All right, So when she has this breakthrough, she says, where there was room for only one truth, I must save char. And then she goes on about like, I found a power that I hadn't had before. I hadn't been able to find it for a lesser cause and I found my voice. It feels so rooted to him.
Speaker 3:Oh, patriarchy ba Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, just, just to add with that, you're not wrong, but just to add to that, I gotta, I gotta find it
Speaker 3:<laugh>. I mean, I get it. It's, it's love.
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 3:It's supposed toing
Speaker 2:Him made him more mine than ever. I don't know. I feel like the, I, ooh,
Speaker 1:Here we go. I don't love that. My safety from the OERs hadn't been enough. The rescue hadn't been enough. All these things hadn't been enough. Keel was enough. The country comes first and then char was enough. You're not wrong, but, but it's bigger too.
Speaker 3:<laugh>. So literally the moral of the story is king and country<laugh>.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just, I don't love that we, we get repeatedly in that chapter. I'm not enough.
Speaker 1:That is true.
Speaker 2:We're not gonna, And that to me is a really problematic message to give girls. That's true. Because everything in our society tells us I'm not enough.
Speaker 3:And that you have to accommodate. Yes.
Speaker 2:We put so much on girls from birth to do for others. Obligation, responsibility,
Speaker 3:Obedience,
Speaker 2:And you know, lose yourself in the process. It's not about you. You should be selfless and all of these things. And I feel like this is just very much ending on that note. Like, what's really good for you is you're not enough. It's for other people. And that being a man too is also very like, oh, to me, but that feels regressive. Like what are we doing different than a fairytale here? Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, we're giving the same take home where it is all about the prince. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I do wanna say that. I, I I I agree with you. I'm not gonna argue with that at all. Like, um, and it, it makes me think about how the new and progressive messages we were telling young girls have evolved. Like when I was a kid reading this book, the not like other girls thing felt, it did feel as if it was the empowering thing to hear because it wasn't just like the girls around me. It was like, we're telling you that the princess of this story doesn't have to be perfectly poised and blonde and all these things that had been, you know, the trope for so long mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And so that, that felt like an important thing to emphasize. And now looking at it, it's like, let's not set up girls as each other's enemies. Right? Mm. And now we read it and say like, we see the bigger problems, but reading it as a little girl in the context of, you know, 20 years ago it still felt like I was getting something empowering from it even though there was further it could have gone. And
Speaker 2:That's where I could've learned. But then I think for the, like how does it hold up now? Exactly. Would we recommend it to get that in mind? Hmm. And I'm, uh, Maybe, you know, I I wouldn't say like I wouldn't let a child read grims fairy tales. Like I think I'll let a kid read whatever they want, but like, I feel like this is a book I would want to deconstruct with a kid afterwards and just be like, What did you get out of this? Oh yeah. Because I do feel like the message at the end of the day isn't what I want. And like if the child is taking it as a fairytale, like nobody reads grims and thinks like, Oh well this is what I want for myself, I guess at this point. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, it's certainly not a child that's at the age to read this. I mean, maybe a five year old does, I wanna be the princess at the ball, but because this is a little bit more sophisticated mm-hmm.<affirmative> and it's a little bit modernized, does the child still walk away with a, What I really want for myself is to find a man that loves me enough that like I can do whatever he needs me to be. Yeah. Which I don't love.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, I mean, there's also a part of me that still goes back to the idea that this is more of the idea of being in this world and reacting to it. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, because I remember as a kid, a lot of the older people, like the teenagers and a lot of other girls and a lot of women that I knew, it seemed like they could do everything perfectly. I never saw them make a mistake. And I think a lot of that is how we are socialized that if we do make a mistake, no one can ever know about it. Ever. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And so for me, seeing that this character who is a good person, who is really nice, struggle with stuff and have to have, you know, bloody hands from wiping the floors. And there was something about that that was at least for 10 year old me kind of empowering. Like, here is somebody who makes mistakes. But on this side of 25 years after the book was first released, I kind of sit there and go, I dunno about that.
Speaker 2:Certainly with a lot of the books that we've picked to cover for this, which we've picked based on folks saying, Hey, this book was important to me as a child, have that sort of heroin in them. They have the heroin who's not perfect and she's maybe a tomboy or she gets into scrapes or she makes a mess and then has to fix it. And I think that there's something really important there about how many of us really wanted that as children. We wanted a character and that, you know, we talk about representation a lot and having a flaw to heroin on some level looked like us to a great diversity of us who were reading these books as kids. Yeah. And that's wonderful. I just don't know that this for me holds up in the same way that some of the other books have just because of how it sticks. The landing at the end. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> is a little bit,
Speaker 1:I can agree
Speaker 2:The bow she ties it up in is a little bit problematic to me reading it now, but again, that's reading as an adult, and I don't have the tie to this book as a child that you all did. So like, I can't backwards look at like, what would I, what would I have taken from it at the time. Yeah. But I, I do think there's real validity to saying it's important for us to have heroins that are real people, you know? That they have issues and struggles and problems and and they aren't just perfect and they do everything right the first time and Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I agree with you. And thinking about, like, I, I felt similarly that like there's books that are written now for girls now are gonna be able to cover the things that the girls now need and a way that this book can't.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Books are always a product of the context that they were created in. So obviously 2022 is gonna look whole lot different than 1997. But I think for me personally, what I recommend now, I feel like it would be a yes with like five asterisks<laugh> with like a warning of don't think too much about it because the issue really is if you're a little kid, it's fun. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> when you're an adult, you're sitting here going, Oh my no.
Speaker 2:Well, and so that also brings up that this was a Newberry book. Um, we've read some other Newberry books and you know, of the Newberry books that we've read, it's been a real mixed bag in terms of how well they've held up. And I think of this one sort of in contrast to something like the Westing game, which I would absolutely recommend now mm-hmm.<affirmative> even though it's even older than this book. Whereas this one I'm more on the fence about because I'm not sure, I'm just not sure it's as well done. There's not enough if the message isn't right. So in a lot of these books, the message is so good that you can kind of be like, Oh, I can overlook some of the flaws in this, this one, the message doesn't quite land for me. And I'm not sure this is like great literature in and of itself if you take the message out of it. Like, I don't know that the writing is fantastic in this. Yeah. There's not, it is very generic. I think we've used that word a lot of times. There's a lot of books doing similar things to this. To me, this one doesn't jump out as like, oh, this did it better than the other ones in this class of books.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, I think I'd honestly recommend some of her, the same authors other books maybe before this one, Like the, the two Princesses of Ba mar stands out a lot. I haven't read it super recently, but, uh, I remember the ending, like totally throwing me off and blowing my little mind about what a happy ending or not so happy ending could look like. So like the, the author can do good things and, and really creative things. But, and, and I don't think this is like a bad example of her writing, but if you're gonna pick one out, maybe this isn't the strongest.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna make a very, very, very bad joke. It's like she was trying to shove a foot into a shoe that was too small.
Speaker 1:<laugh>. Yeah. Nice
Speaker 3:<laugh>. I saw it. I went for it. I apologize.<laugh>. No,
Speaker 2:I that's fair. We can always, we can always go with a, an apt metaphor or pun in this page.
Speaker 1:<laugh> for me, my, my personal summary for it, I wouldn't say that it fell flat for me. I still really enjoyed rereading it and I still enjoyed Ella as a character for all of her blind spots. There's a lot of other books in this genre out there now Yeah. That are more connected to what we want in this day and age. So I'll keep it on my own shelf, but maybe not pass it around a whole lot.
Speaker 3:It was foreshadowing Shrek<laugh>, I'm sorry, which,
Speaker 1:Speaking
Speaker 2:Of there mentioned that the,
Speaker 1:Um, yeah,
Speaker 2:The movie version of
Speaker 1:This, Briefly talk about the movie The
Speaker 2:Sh reifying of Ella. So I would like you to comment on that,
Speaker 1:Theresa. Oh my God. Sh
Speaker 3:Reification arc
Speaker 1:Go. So I, I'm gonna start by saying they were trying to be Shrek while missing what Shrek did. Well, so I don't mean to slander Shrek<laugh>.
Speaker 3:There will be no Shrek slander.
Speaker 1:Well, making the movie, they decided they must have decided that it just wasn't gonna appeal to kids enough, which I think means that they didn't understand what the book had that was good about it. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So they made some really bad changes. Like the book, the magic fairy book that she has is, well, let me start with Mandy isn't like her fairy godmother with limited magic or who puts limits on her own magic. She's just a fairy that sucks at being a fairy. And so the magic fairy book is her, her boyfriend that she accidentally turned into a book. So there is like a magic mirror style face on the front of this fairy book that talks throughout the whole thing. It's absolutely creepy. Painful to watch. It's horrible. And then we talked a little bit about how we didn't feel like the treatment of other, like humanoid species was great. The movie, they try to act like they're more aware of it by having Ella like protest the treatment of ogres. But then the actual movie portrayal of ogres and elves is horrendous. Like they're just bumbling buffoons. The elves are like legally only allowed to be entertainers, which is presented in the movie as a very bad thing, obviously. But then the actual elves like that is literally all they are in the movie at the same time. It's Ella and Char only know each other for like three days. There's not like a friendship that starts when they're kids. It's very, very bad.
Speaker 3:<laugh>. I, I, full closure, I have not watched the film. I did do a really quick cursory search. I'd like to say number one, it came out in 2004. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, so that's relatively removed from when this book was really popular. So I feel like it was a case of, oh, we got the rights for this. Yeah. All right. Let's, hmm. Okay. Princesses. Um, Anne Hathaway, you Hey. Yeah. Come over here.
Speaker 1:Who is not at her best in this movie?
Speaker 2:<laugh>. Well I find that really strange casting just out of the gate and I, I haven't seen this movie in a long time mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, but Anne Hathaway for me does not at all work for the Ella that was in the
Speaker 1:Book. And she doesn't feel like she's acting naturally as an Anne Hathaway version of the character either. It feels like she's trying to like, make herself smaller and like sweet and little in a way that feels really unnerving to be perfectly honest. Yeah. The way, yeah. The way her curse is treated is my main bone to pick with the movie. They, they turn it into a gag. Yeah. Like I, I, I'd really like in the book that like whenever she has to obey something, it's like a physical struggle. Um, and she's able to resist to a point and that's an important part of how she maintains any smidgen of agency for herself. And in the movie it's just like a magic snap your fingers, she like turns into a, a robot robot and just does it. And half the time it's just for laughs too. Oh
Speaker 3:My gosh.
Speaker 1:It's, yeah, like I said, just completely disrespectful of the source material and what half way
Speaker 2:Commented apparently that she prefers the way the movie turned out to the book because it makes fun of itself for being a
Speaker 1:Fairytale. And that's what I mean, like, they were trying to make iTrick
Speaker 2:That kind of erases any message that the book was trying to send Exactly. Anyways. If you do it as a humorous, cuz that's not meant to be fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It meant to be, it's torture. Like her experience,
Speaker 2:Hey, that is a terrible curse to, to have to just obey and you don't have your own agency. And I do think the book does a really good job of depicting that. Like all of the stupid stuff that Hattie makes her do you really see how traumatic that would be mm-hmm.<affirmative> to lose your voice and your agency in that way. So to play that for
Speaker 1:Laughs is exactly a choice. And I, I really liked her, her boarding school experience in the book for that, that like, she has to obey all the petty little commands about her, her posture and her stitches and her, the volume of her voice and everything, but none of it comes naturally either. So she's constantly having to like police every movement that she makes or else be like fully nauseous every second of the day. Like that's torture.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And I don't like the idea of making fun of that because the, or I think part of the appeal of the original book is that it does make it very vivid mm-hmm.<affirmative> of like the effects of this sort of thing. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> like, oh, um, do this, do that. And, and as a little kid reading this, I already don't have a lot of agency. The only thing I really can do is where I walk and even then there are limits. So it was really scary for me to read. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So I can't help but ask Ms. Hathaway,<laugh>, what was you, you thought this was an improvement? Okay, that's, that is a decision. There's
Speaker 1:A, Yeah. And it doesn't sound like the author of<laugh>. Yeah. Fair
Speaker 3:<laugh>. Each episode we are heading into the library and talking to you. Well not you, you, but people like you right here in the stacks today. We want to know if you were at the royal ball, what faux pa would you commit that would give away that you are really not royalty? Not wearing a dress
Speaker 5:Because
Speaker 3:I don't wanna wear one.
Speaker 6:I'd probably like, would not wanna blow my cover, but that's the reason I'm gonna blow my cover. I'll probably like talk in a British accent or something and they'll kick me out.<laugh>.
Speaker 4:Um,
Speaker 7:Probably the way I dress, I think I might try to be like over the top and I might dress like too, too fancy I guess you could say.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 8:Feel it would be the dance cuz I'll be messing up in the dance.
Speaker 9:For me, I would say feeling like if I'm a fall or like trip and I don't know how to like
Speaker 3:Dance yet basically, Oh, can I go? Yeah, I would trip a hundred percent trip but
Speaker 10:Blow my cover out of royal ball. I don't know. I feel like I would say the wrong thing or something like that. And then just like completely embarrass myself I guess.
Speaker 11:Um, the mistake that I would make is probably that I'd be a little bit too crazy for royal, for royalty.
Speaker 5:Same here. I think I would forget on a crown or jewelry because that's the most important thing because when you have a crown that's when you know that they're actually a princess. But I think I would gets put on cause I'm very forgetful.
Speaker 12:Address the people by the right way. Like not say ma'am or you know, or your highness or something. I might forget to do something like that.
Speaker 5:Not dancing correctly.
Speaker 2:So today we are going to play a little game designed by Hannah called would you pass finishing school. I will give the scenarios to the two of you and you will answer and we will determine whether you will pass finishing school.
Speaker 3:<laugh>. Oh dear.
Speaker 2:In Ella's world, I suppose
Speaker 3:I'm finish school. I did six years<laugh>,
Speaker 2:You are at the Palace of the King and somehow you don't know how you have found yourself walking and talking with the king. You know that your position in space matters greatly in court etiquette and you need to stand or move in the correct place near the king to show respect. Where do you place yourself in relation to the king? A behind him To show yourself as a lower social position, even though it will make carrying on a conversation hard B to the right of him to show that you are at the moment his right hand woman or C to his left. Because placing a monarch on your right shows proper deference and places him in the position of honor.
Speaker 3:I'm guessing C I'm guessing C based only on what I know about chess.<laugh>. No, like the placement of the, the pieces unrelated to any of this. When you said that the king, I immediately thought of Charles II because that's what we're calling him now. You know the Monarch formerly known as Prince. So strange. Yeah, it still feels weird and I'm like, do I wanna talk to this man? No I don't. Behind him far, far near me.
Speaker 2:So the correct is
Speaker 3:<laugh> we're not executing
Speaker 2:Yet.<laugh>. The correct answer is to place the monarch on your right. All right, great. Number two, you're at a fancy banquet and the soup course was just placed in front of you. You delicately take a sip from your soup spoon. Proud that you have managed not to slur and you selected the correct utensil. However, the swallow of soup you now have in your mouth has the unmistakable presence of a hair. How do you get it out of your mouth without being rude? You
Speaker 3:Swallow it or die.
Speaker 2:We've learned from Ella's mom, you're just drinking that hair. A excuse yourself with a mouthful of soup to try to find the bathroom. B, spit it onto the edge of the plate or C, carefully deposit it into your napkin hoping the liquid doesn't get everywhere.
Speaker 3:Napkin I, I feel like it's C
Speaker 2:So it is to discreetly deposit it into your napkin. Yes,
Speaker 3:We're not dead yet. Which
Speaker 2:Importantly should be folded with the crease towards you so that the outer facing corner can be used to dab around the mouth.
Speaker 3:Oh,
Speaker 2:Important to know you need to visit the ladies room. But to your dismay, the dinner shows no sign of stopping. Do you a tap your glass with your fork and politely ask permission to visit the bathroom? For
Speaker 1:Sure. For sure. That one.
Speaker 2:B, leave quietly and discreetly without saying anything to anyone. Or C, announce loudly to your dinner companions and your vicinity so that at least someone knows you're coming back and not to clear your plate.
Speaker 1:Oh I don't know. I think it's B cuz Isn't there a way to arrange your silverwares so that it look so it like says I'm coming back. Yeah, like you cross them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And to not remove your plate. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to definitively say B is the correct answer here. All right. I think that there and Maa are both ladies who would pass finishing school in Curia.<laugh>.
Speaker 1:Well we didn't even get to posture or stitching or dancing.
Speaker 2:No, you didn't dance on your tiny feet at all.
Speaker 1:<laugh>. Each episode we ask whether our book passes the Bechtel test. The Beal test asks whether a work features two female characters who talk to each other about something that doesn't involve men or boys. So does Ella Enchanted pass? Yes, for
Speaker 2:Sure. Plenty of conversations between the women in this book. Mandy and Ella have a jillion conversations. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>? Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, she has conversations with her friends at finish. Well her friend<laugh>
Speaker 1:At finishing school
Speaker 2:And her frenemies at finishing school. So yeah, there's plenty there.
Speaker 1:Unfortunate acquaintances. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:<affirmative>. Well that's it for this episode of these books. Made me join us next time when we'll discuss a book in which somebody's uncle is writing them a whole lot of letters. If you think you know which book we're tackling next, drop us a tweet. We are at pgc mls on Twitter and hashtag these books made.