I Got A Condition

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Finally picked up A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass—queenlyzard recommended it to me some time back as a YA novel about synesthesia, something I might, for obvious reasons,want to take a look at . I kept forgetting to look for it, but when I came across it while shelving books the other day, I seized it.

And, as with any book that portrays an experience that I can share, I have opinions. Starting with the cover.

I love this cover. I have never seen a book cover that was so surprisingly accurate and so infuriatingly wrong at the same time.



I’m not talking about the cover art, which is not very interesting, but about the letters at the top. I don’t know if it’s apparent on this image, but each letter has not only a specific color, but also a texture. The g even has purple spots. This is actually pretty true to what goes on in a synesthete’s head—letters do indeed have color and texture.*

However … it’s still overwhelmingly wrong.

I mean, in what crazy mixed-up backwards upside-down bizarro universe is the letter a YELLOW?

Seriously. Everyone knows it’s bright pink.

Don’t even get me started on that m. Good god.

Anyway, while the book has a nice enough plot of standard tweenage Journey Of Self-Discovery, I must admit the portrayal of The Synesthesia Experience felt—well, overdone. Granted, I’m only comparing to my own experience, but it is strange to see its process be so dramatic. Unlike the main character in this book, I had no traumatic school experiences involving ridicule by classmates and angry parent-teacher conferences; no fleeting fear that I was crazy; no carrying it as a deep dark secret; no real way it inhibited my life. I just remember it always being there, and finding out through a very short conversation** (so unremarkable that I don’t remember who it was with) that I might be unique, and then not really worrying about it or even giving it a second thought. Then I found an article that named it, and I got rather interested in it for a while because hey, who wouldn’t be interested in their own newly-discovered mutant power? It never would have occurred to me that it was a stigma of any sort, or something to fear.

And the badge on the cover saying that this book won the ALA Schneider Family Book Award, which honors the “artistic expression of the disability experience,” is just bizarre. When the hell has synesthesia ever been a disability? I mean, yes, it’s unusual, and yes, for some it can be distracting, and yes, it can give you strong opinions about really weird things. And, yes, every once in a while somebody reacts with slight hostility when you explain what it is.

That, my friends, is not a disability. You can’t say, straightfaced, that synesthesia is anything like those real disabilities, the ones people really have to work around. A synesthete can’t tell someone with, say, severe ataxic cerebral palsy “Oh, yeah, I know exactly what you’re going through with your disability, with the falling down and the speech problems and the writing problems and the morons who think you aren’t intelligent and so forth. Why, just the other day I saw a poster with the letters all mixed up, and it was mildly irritating.”

Hell, I don’t think synesthesia even counts as a condition. It’s pretty much a sensory bonus.

*ahem* Sorry. Sometimes I get a little annoyed with that sort of thinking.

But there were some moments that rang wonderfully true. For a non-synesthete, the author gives some pretty spot-on descriptions of the main character’s extremely specific sensations for the colors of graphemes, and there’s one great bit when a the synesthesia specialist asks the main character how she pictures the calendar year, and she says “Just like everybody else” and then launches into a long confused description of the year as a Ferris wheel that goes counterclockwise and falls over and god knows what else. And the way she feels totally attached to it, like it’s an important part of her, is great.

Mostly my response to the book is one you get when someone else describes something you’ve experienced, too—you want to tell your version of it. And it will probably help at least a few kids recognize their own synesthesia. Likeable, but not my usual style.


*And also 3-D depth, lighting, highlights, gender, personality, and location in space, but that’s hard to render on a book cover. And it’s not always, mind. Just for some.

**“You ever notice how letters and numbers have color?”
“... No.”
“Oh. It must just be me then.”

Comments

*butts into convo*

[mis-creation.livejournal.com]

For me, it's that they're a lot less like everything else out there. I love the Alanna books, and they're good quality, but they're very similar in their medieval-Europe-with-magic setting to almost all the other YA and non-YA fantasy out there.

Pierce said somewhere that the inspiration for the setting for the CoM came from her study of the Silk Road and the ancient Middle East trading centers where radically diverse cultures met and traded. Not too many books based on that sort of thing and add in a well-thought-out magical system, interesting cultures, and characters I love, and it's very easy for me to see why I love these books so much.

Re: *butts into convo*

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I think she writes Tortall well, and it's one of my favorite retellings of the usual story. But Circle of Magic feels like a much bigger world, and we see only some of the interesting highlights.

And the diversity of cultures is another thing I swoon over. I'm such an anthropological dork. ;)