#deerskin

Deerskin

McKinley’s retellings have generally been designated as “young adult” (YA) literature, an endlessly vexing category to define. Even if Perrault’s “Donkeyskin” has appeared in recent collections for younger audiences, Deerskin is not designated as YA. The Booklist reviewed Deerskin twice in one issue—once under Adult/Science Fiction and once under Adult Fiction for Young Adults, a clear sign of uncertainty about boundaries. The cover “blurbs” to the novel and audience designations in book reviews imply that the novel is McKinley’s “crossover”—from YA to “adult”—text. Since the YA designation can attract readers as young as the ten-to-thirteen age group, she clearly intended to exclude readers of her earlier novels. Here are McKinley’s own words, from an online interview: “I [ . . . ] received some fairly spectacular hate mail for Deerskin, which is, and was meant to be, a more difficult and bleaker book, telling me I had ‘betrayed my audience’ and was a vile human being to tackle such a subject at all and so on. Deerskin was even published as an adult book for adults—partly, I hoped, as a clue that it wasn’t for younger readers—and perhaps the clue worked with some people. It certainly didn’t with others.” Intensity of sexual violence, a negative image of parents, and a depiction of active vengeance against these parents are elements that tend to move a book toward the “adult” designation. Interestingly, school library journals do not exclude mention of Deerskin; they do signal its “difference” from The Door in the Hedge or Beauty, probably the most popular of McKinley’s YA fantasies, and classify it for “grade ten and up.” This designation is appropriate; the novel demands mature empathy (but not beyond the scope of some readers in this group) and its measured style requires a willingness to participate in a demanding reading experience.

“Her fingers crawled upwards and touched the outer curve of her breast, and the fingers paused, quaking in fear; but after the moment, despite the panic trying to break out of its shadows and seize her mind, she told her fingers, go on. This is my body. I reclaim my body for myself: for my use, for my understanding, for my kindness and care. Go on. And the fingers walked cautiously on, over the curiously muscles, faintly ridged flesh, cooler than the rest of the body, across the tender nipple, into the deep cleft between, and out onto the breast that lay limp and helpless and hardly recognizable as round, lying like a hunting trophy over her other arm. Mine, she thought. My body. It lives on the breaths I breathe and the food I eat; the blood my heart pumps reaches all of me, into all my hidden crevices, from my scalp to my heels.”