Thursday, June 4, 2015
Compare/Contrast Between Red Queen and El Deafo
(Red Queen, by Victoria Aveyard; El Deafo, by CeCe Bell)
If you've heard of these books, you'll know they're pretty differ-ent. To summarize Red Queen, a girl lives in a world divided by blood. People with Silver blood are rulers, and they have special powers. People with Red blood have no special talent and are generally very poor. Mare Barrow is an anomaly–her blood is Red as dawn, but she has talents up her sleeve and is forced to marry the prince. In El Deafo, a girl struggles with the social consequences of being deaf and wearing giant hearing aids.
So take Red Queen. Mare is a Red who has grown up in poverty. But when she shows off her strange abilities, ones that shouldn't exist, she's married into the royal family. Mare has been thrust into a new world, one of balls and etiquette, feasts and silk. Meanwhile, the Reds are beginning to grow unsatisfied with their position at the bottom of the barrel....
In El Deafo, CeCe (it's an autobiography)has grown up in the city, where she has attended a sheltered school for the deaf. But she moves into the country/suburbs, where there is only one school. Just like that, she's in regular, hearing classrooms, making regular hearing friends. And there may just be a boy involved...
Anyway, these books are similar because they both shove girls into unfamiliar situations where they are physically different.
They're different for some obvious reasons: Red Queen takes place in a dystopia, El Deafo takes place in 1970's Virginia. Mare fights for her life, while CeCe fights for friends. But the characters deal with their problems differently. Mare is more of a headstrong, fight -first-questions-later kind of girl, as are many main characters in dystopian YA literature. CeCe is quieter and more subtle. I'll give them this, though: they are both brave, in different ways.
I love both of these books!
If you've heard of these books, you'll know they're pretty differ-ent. To summarize Red Queen, a girl lives in a world divided by blood. People with Silver blood are rulers, and they have special powers. People with Red blood have no special talent and are generally very poor. Mare Barrow is an anomaly–her blood is Red as dawn, but she has talents up her sleeve and is forced to marry the prince. In El Deafo, a girl struggles with the social consequences of being deaf and wearing giant hearing aids.
So take Red Queen. Mare is a Red who has grown up in poverty. But when she shows off her strange abilities, ones that shouldn't exist, she's married into the royal family. Mare has been thrust into a new world, one of balls and etiquette, feasts and silk. Meanwhile, the Reds are beginning to grow unsatisfied with their position at the bottom of the barrel....
In El Deafo, CeCe (it's an autobiography)has grown up in the city, where she has attended a sheltered school for the deaf. But she moves into the country/suburbs, where there is only one school. Just like that, she's in regular, hearing classrooms, making regular hearing friends. And there may just be a boy involved...
Anyway, these books are similar because they both shove girls into unfamiliar situations where they are physically different.
They're different for some obvious reasons: Red Queen takes place in a dystopia, El Deafo takes place in 1970's Virginia. Mare fights for her life, while CeCe fights for friends. But the characters deal with their problems differently. Mare is more of a headstrong, fight -first-questions-later kind of girl, as are many main characters in dystopian YA literature. CeCe is quieter and more subtle. I'll give them this, though: they are both brave, in different ways.
I love both of these books!
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