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The 90s in September are miserable, folks. Miserable! And according to the forecast, that’s what we’re getting today…and tomorrow…AND Sunday.
Ugh.
On the other hand, yesterday I bit the bullet and committed myself to finishing Margarita Engle’s Rima’s Rebellion: Courage in a Time of Tyranny, which required more concentration than I’ve felt capable of lately. Engle is a poet first and a novelist second, so part of the problem is just that lyrical verse is harder in my current stage of life; Rima’s Rebellion, however, was harder for me to concentrate on than Engle’s other novels have been, and while some of that may be personally situational, so to speak, I think the novel’s time frame is also a factor. When you start out in 1923 and end up in 1936, you’re attempting to cover a big chunk of time; when that chunk of time covers both the coming of age period in a girl’s life and the most important years of the fight for women’s suffrage in a dictatorship, a verse novel of less than two hundred pages may not have enough words to fully realize the task. (Yes, I used two semi-colons too close together; today I just don’t care.*) Rima is also illegitimate, and that adds another significant issue into the mix. I think I would have preferred a regular novel for the purpose, you know? Except that Engle IS a poet, and she’s the one out there writing for teens about Cuba’s history, and that’s something worth doing, and–well, I imagine she has to do it her way. To be fair, I found the concept of las mambisas even more fascinating than the intricacies surrounding the issue of ‘natural’ children, so it isn’t as if the reading experience was boring. I think I might have actually done better if I’d tried reading one or two poems (of a page or three each) a night, EVERY night.
Bottom line? Rima’s Rebellion covers a fascinating topic with poeticism. Whether or not her intended audience is going to appreciate it, I honestly don’t know; what I do know is that it’s completely worth reading, but it’s going to take more concentration than most works of youth fiction.
You can do with that what you will.
*You see what I did there…