Brandy Painter's Reviews > Vinegar Girl

I was going to give this two stars due to mild entertainment but then I started writing the review and realized how mad I truly was.

This is meant to be a retelling of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. This is a play I am equal parts fascinated and repulsed by, but I am always interested when it is used for new stories. I am unashamed to admit that I judge all retellings of this play in comparison to my feelings for the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. People may automatically turn up their noses at this and declare me oh so unsophisticated and unduly influenced by the pop culture of my youth. I do not care. I love that movie. 10 Things I Hate About You managed to celebrate the core of Shakespeare's plot while subverting it at the same time. It celebrated girls in their differences and honored the bonds of sisterhood. It gave Kate and Bianca agency and brought boys into their lives who were misguided at times but decent human beings. This is what I look for when I read a modern day reinterpretation of Shakespeare's story, because it is not possible to keep its original form and have it make sense in a modern setting. Anne Tyler disappointed me in this.

In Vinegar Girl, Kate is not a shrew. She isn't a dark tortured soul who snipes and snarks as a defense mechanism to protect herself. She is a doormat, an apathetic girl who lets the vagaries of life push her where they will and occasionally she works up enough oomph to snark about it. Even then she is not that funny or complex. Yawn. Her father and Pyotr don't have to work that hard to make her cave to any of their schemes or demands. She capitulates so fast I had to reread a page to make sure I read it correctly. The contrast set up between Kate and Bunny (this version's Bianca) is lazy. Bunny is everything society is supposed to loathe teen girls for. She is blonde and takes time to style her hair. She listens to Taylor Swift (lol-let's all make fun of her). She makes statements that sound like questions. She flirts with the bad older neighbor she hires as her Spanish tutor. She allows him to influence her into fake vegetarianism. I mean how stupid can she be right? (The ending she gets in the epilogue is the last of many pokes into the voodoo doll she's supposed to be for all girls who like clothes, make-up, boys, worry about their appearance, and are in to pop culture.) It's the lazy false dichotomy set-up I hate hate hate in books about women. Here is a heroine. She is Different. Not like all those Other Girls. She is intelligent and misunderstood and snarky. To prove it we will not show her being intelligent or having a personality, we will simply give her a foil that represents everything that is meant to be reprehensible about femininity. This makes steam come out my ears for so many reasons. Women are not The Highlander. There can be more than one of us, and we do not have to be in constant competition. We contain multitudes. When men write this silly set up, it annoys me. When women writers do it, it ENRAGES me. In the case of Kate, it fails spectacularly. Bunny can rage immaturely like the best of teen drama queens. Kate is just boring, flat, and completely without agency. This actually makes Bunny the more fascinating character. And Kate's little speech at the end? THAT had me rolling my eyes so hard they nearly stuck. (view spoiler)[She yells at Bunny that she needs to chill. Men have it SO HARD because they aren't allowed to show their feelings or fail ever. "Men have been stuck with the sports competitions and the wars and the fame and success." Yes, poor men. I can't even with that. (hide spoiler)] The speech comes out of nowhere too and Tyler gives us no character development to show how Kate got from, well not Point A to Point B since she never had an opinion to begin with so we'll say......not even on the map to somewhere in the land of Male Worshippers Are Us. And do not even get me started on how much one has to suspend disbelief to buy the Epilogue after the zero character development and relationship development between Kate and Pyotr through the book. I've never read an Anne Tyler book before so I'm not sure if this is her phoning it in for this project or if it's her usual style to not develop characters and rely on bad tropes instead.

Yes, in the end I think a teen movie from the 90s had more nuance and character development than this book written by a Pulitzer winner.