domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

First, I apologize for underestimating my readership in a previous post. I do not have two readers; I have four. This is, understandably, a source of great excitement, which sounds like it’s sarcastic but is actually sincere. Hi!

Second, today I was going to post about something interesting, or important, or at least funny, but instead, something horrible has happened. Something awful.

Barbie. Specifically, this book:

Maura’s school had a book fair. All the books were half off their cover price, so I sent her with ten bucks and she came back with two books and six bucks change. Excellent. The next day, though, the kids were apparently allowed to pick a free book to bring home. After the relatively normal books that she’d brought home the first day, I figured that maybe Barbie wasn’t that bad. Two decent books and one that’s annoying, but not overly so–it sounds okay, right?

So tonight, Nick agreed to read Barbie & The Diamond Castle to Maura. I was fortunate enough to be puttering around doing other things, but I caught enough of the book to be both bored and sort of horrified, so once they were done reading I convinced Maura to give me the book to read tonight.

You guys, you have no idea how bad this book is. It looks like it was illustrated in Poser. Crappy Poser, even, complete with faces that seem to float just the tiniest bit too far away from the bodies to which they’re ostensibly attached. Depressingly, the illustrations are probably the high point of the book–and I say that despite the fact that the single fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde girl is the focal point of every page. (Seriously, she’s the only blonde in the book. Predictably, she is also the only one who is brave enough to continue on a quest to save some girl, and is also the only one smart enough not to get stuck in the Evil Witch’s trap.)

Moving on. we’re left with the plot. Actually, I’d like to rephrase: we’re left with the “plot”. The story reads like it’s the worst of fanfic, written, maybe, by a gaggle of five-year-old girls. We start with “two beautiful best friends” who live together in a cottage in the forest. An old woman inexplicably gives them a magical mirror in which another girl, Melody, is hiding, and Melody convinces them that they have to find a hidden castle. Off they go!

What’s the best start to every quest? Maybe it’s having a clear objective, or an achievable goal, or at least taking along supplies. In Barbie-land, it’s apparently “two adorable puppies [Barbie and friend] named Lily and Sparkles.” Like all people on quests, the girls put the puppies into woven baskets that they then carry with them. (Apparently the dogs came with baskets included, because Barbie (whose name is Liana in this book, for some reason) and her friend Alexa set out with nothing. I don’t know.)

As they continue on their quest, they meet the Evil Witch. (You can tell she’s evil because her hair has bright red streaks in it. Obviously.) Luckily for Barbie/Liana and Alexa, their magical friendship necklaces protected them from the witch’s evil powers. For reasons that I don’t understand, though, despite not being subject to the evil powers, they couldn’t escape the witch until “handsome twin musicians, Ian and Jeremy” showed up and helped the girls escape. Lucky that the handsome twins just happened to be out, late at night, in the middle of the forest.

Then some other stuff happens, and then the witch pushes them into a “molten lava pit!” This is really where it crosses into the “and then there was a shark, and the bad guys fed him to it” territory. Somehow, they end up on a shelf inside the pit of molten lava, and they escape. No sooner do they get away from the lava, when–the witch shows up! Again.

This time she makes a churning black whirlpool of evil and tries to lure them into it, but they end up pushing her in. Hurrah! The witch is dead, right? …right?

Wrong.

Liana and Alexa use a “key to find the Diamond Castle–it was a special song!” If you are not six, you’re looking at that and wondering how a castle can be a song, then realizing that it’s just poorly worded. The castle shows up, and everyone is happy. And then…

AND THEN the witch comes back. What? She was in a whirlpool of churning blackness and bad computer-generated graphics! How did she end up at the magical hidden secret diamond castle of magic and light and goodness? Apparently we’ll never know, because Liana and Alexa and Melody, who’s no longer trapped in the mirror, sing the witch a song that’s so unbearably perfect that she turns into stone.

On the last page, Alexa and Liana have been crowned Princesses of Music and everyone’s living happily ever after. Since it is impossible to live happily ever after without boys, the handsome twin musicians have showed up again, this time with neon blue electric guitars. The end.

I just–I mean–what? I’m not even going to go into the weird word choices and odd constructions and and and. I’m relieved that this was a free book, because I would be incredibly cranky had she paid for this.

In completely unrelated news, Maura thinks that the word for diary is diarrhea. Tonight she asked if we’d buy her a new diarrhea so that she could write in it. So far, we’ve managed not to laugh at her (that she’s aware of) and have avoided telling her that the word she is looking for is diary.

And, obviously, we went right out to the store. When your newly literate kid asks for a her own diarrhea, what else can you do?