Review: This Winter by Alice Oseman

Charlie Spring is a character that author Alice Oseman seems to come back to time and time again. Initially Charlie was introduced to readers via Oseman's first novel, Solitare, as the brother of protagonist Tori Spring. From there, Charlie has starred in This Winter, a prequel to Solitare, Heartstopper a successful webcomic which later turned into a four volume series of graphic novels, an upcoming Netflix series (see more here) and a novella, Nick and Charlie. And okay, Charlie has a fairly compelling story arc, with his struggles with his sexuality, his romance with Nick, and anorexia. That's a heck of a lot of material for one teenage boy. So why then, when Oseman writes about Charlie Spring does it feel as though the author is writing fan fiction of her own work?

This Winter is set after the events of the Heartstopper and prior to those of Solitare and Nick and Charlie. It is Christmas. Charlie is home from hospital and recovering, Tori is trying to work out how to be a good sister to him, their seven year old brother Oliver wants everyone to be happy, and their parents are busy trying to organise Christmas, with involves a Christmas Day visit from their extroverted relatives who like to ask rather ridiculous and personal questions at the table. Charlie and Tori have enough, take it all out on the wrong people, and Charlie storms off to Nick's place. Then Tori convinces Charlie to come home and Oliver convinces their mother to apologise. That's basically it. The rest of the novella is padded out with pictures and a massive extract from Solitare. 

The novella, or should I say, short story, feels very rushed. Although the reader is supposed to feel sorry for Charlie (and I did to an extent, the questions he was asked were rather rude,) the story is too biased toward the character. Having a mental illness is tough. Having parents who are struggling to understand how to best deal with it is tough. But there is also a failure on Oseman's part to show Charlie finding a way to accept and understand that his parents are human, and that they have feelings, and failings, just like him. Consequently, Charlie Spring remains in victim mode--it isn't Charlie who has to find his own way through, or to navigate parents who try--and fail--to understand what he is going through. It is the rest of the family, who will have to change to suit him. Of course, it's worth mentioning that the events in This Winter are set prior to Solitare and living with mental illness is an important theme of that novel. Also, Oseman was barely out of her teens when both were published, meaning that she may have lacked the life experience to view the situation from any perspective other than that of her teenage characters.

Overall, a disappointing read. 

Not really recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more