I am reading The Orenda by Joseph Boyden. I’m not complaining about the lack of women in the book. One-third of the narrative is women-told. That’s fine-ish – there are only three main characters and at least one is a woman and it’s sort of hard to divide three in two and still get an integer, so I accept that. However, the one-third female narrative, you’d probably not get that from the dust-jacket-blurb. Let’s break it down:
Number of lines in dust-jacket-blurb: 29
Number of lines describing Bird, a Huron warrior: 11
Number of lines describing Christophe, a French Jesuit missionary: 8
Number of lines describing general This book is the book you should be reading RIGHT NOW: 8
Number of lines describing Snow Falls, an Iroquois girl: 2, kinda 4 because there are two lines of what Bird thinks about Snow Falls.
So, even though, at this point where I am (around page 300 out of 500), Snow Falls is the narrator for about one third or 33% (for those of us who enjoy percentages – should find Square One skit about that) of the time, in the blurb, she gets roughly 7% of the space in the blurb, or 14% if I’m being charitable and taking those two extra lines. One might even read the blurb and not realize that there is a female perspective. Is that the point? Are we trying to trick people who don’t want to read about women? Or is this just another case of disappearing women in media?
So far The Orenda is good, barring the blurb. Skip the blurb. The book is like a car crash in slow motion though – you know nothing good is going to come from all this. In fact, only bad is going to come. It’s going to be awful and heart-wrenching when it gets there and I will, likely, be very sad.