Coming of age.

The thing that I love about good novels with child protagonists is when the author has the capacity to express the depth of knowledge that children have for some things, and the obvious gaps in knowledge that are only filled with experience. Especially when they're written in the first person, novels that use this device come across as so... I don't know... so true.

I have to say that when books have been foisted on me they make much less of an impression on me than when I choose to pick them up. This is unfortunately the case with the much-acclaimed Catcher in the Rye, reputed to be the epitome of the coming-of-age novel, which I read in high school and no longer remember anything about, other than it leaving me with a vague sense of distaste. But others - like Ian McEwan's Atonement and Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness - have that depth-of-knowledge-but-lack-of-emotional-maturity balance happening in them that just floor me.

Crimes horticoles is sort of the same way: Emile, the protagonist, is home-schooled by a well-travelled adventurer Frenchman and is obviously highly knowledgeable in some domains. The novel is in the first person, and Emile's voice is screaming "listen to me, I know big fancy words!" to such an extent that I'm sometimes tempted to explain the references to quattro-cento painters and the Chiaroscuro technique in parentheses, and sometimes I just want to go and give her a good shake for using "Gastropod" over the more accessible "snail."

Gastropod

But that's the 12-year-old in her coming out, isn't it? And it's the writer in me who's read Strunk and White and who admires clarity and concision and comprehensibility over fancy words, going slightly nuts over Emile's loquaciousness.