I am very nearly an adult and a fine scientist and high school graduate who has secured a full scholarship to an excellent university you have certainly heard of in order to absorb the finer points of astrophysics before I go on to alter the course of history in whichever way I see fit.
So saith Tally, the heroine of About a Girl, the third and last in Sarah McCarry’s Metamorphoses trilogy. Unlike her predecessors, Tally has grown up in the certainty of parents who will love her and care for her no matter what, and she is confident in their love and confident in her brilliance, and everything is peachy until she sleeps with her best friend Shane and he doesn’t call afterwards. This small unbalancing of Tally’s world leads her to unbalance it altogether, and she sets off on a journey to find (maybe) her father. But definitely not her mother. Who she doesn’t care about. For sure.
And at last, at the gate to my flight west, I turned my back on New York and took a deep breath and walked forward, away from all the things I knew about and towards the things I didn’t.
Out west, Tally meets a girl with a dog and no electricity, and this girl, Maddy, who is also Medea, tells her stories about the far-distant past that is also the present. All along in this series, Sarah McCarry has been writing about unruly girls and the mythological world, but she’s never nailed down her meaning quite as explicitly as she does here, because she’s never had a heroine as careful and certain as Tally. To this careful, certain(ish) reader, it was a welcome change.
Also unlike McCarry’s other heroines, Tally is given the luxury of choice. She scoffs, at one point in the book, at the notion that sometimes all the available decisions are bad, but of course this is the perspective of a sheltered and beloved child. If Tally makes better choices than her mother and grandmother, than her aunt and great-aunt, it’s because she has the freedom of choice that comes with a stable childhood and a safety net for when she makes mistakes. That McCarry ends the series on a happier note than she did her previous two novels is lovely and hopeful without feeling like a betrayal of Cass and Maia or Aurora and Aunt Beast.
(PS I love it that McCarry makes the nameless protagonist of All Our Pretty Songs a character in About a Girl while still not telling us her name.)
This year is proving to have a theme in mind for me about monster girls, although I didn’t plan it that way. Here’s Tally, as she comes close to the end of her journey:
I watched the light move across the wall of Jack’s room, the way shadows almost looked like black wings. Maybe I can be just a bit monster, I thought. Just enough.
Ovid fans in the audience, please raise your hands! Does any mention of Ovid make you want to go back and reread (retranslate) the Metamorphoses, or am I totally alone in this?