Laura Ruby’s novel Bone Gap takes some of the best features of magical realism and uses them to tell a story about beauty standards. In the plot, the O’Sullivan brothers – whose mom deserted them when they were in their teens – adopt a beautiful Polish exchange student who has been kidnapped by the Scarecrow, a supernatural figure able to see gaps between worlds. Roza, the exchange student, is eventually assisted in her rescue by Finn, and the gap at Bone Gap becomes a bit less threatening.
Notes:
- Ruby manages to solve this puzzle without combat. I find that sort of cool – Finn has a condition called face-blindness, in which he can’t recognize faces, and because of that he’s able to pick Ruby out from the millions of other faces the Scarecrow has lured to the cornfield.
- Finn falls for a girl who is conventionally “homely” because of her extra-large features, which is an interesting take on conventional approaches to beauty. It’s not quite an eye-of-the beholder thing, but…