Zolaria Review

This story by Caitlin Horrocks was really great! It's too bad I could not make the live reading of it. 


The beginning of her story starts off pleasant as she states, "we have finished the fifth grade alive, and we consider that an accomplishment. We have earned this summer." My first thought was that she was speaking from the point of view as a child, thinking that grade school was difficult, not turning into a tear-jerking story. The way Caitlin Horrocks begins with the scene of an upcoming summer and childhood memories is optimistic. As the story of a childhood unfolds, flash forwards of the future intertwine. The flash forwards always included the narrator and her future family, never her friend Hanna. The "princesses of Zolaria" seemed to have an inseparable bond as children. Once Hanna is diagnosed with cancer and undergoes treatment, she is not present in the narrator's daily play routine. The narrator says that: "I will realize I am waiting for her to be either well or dead." This refers to her struggle of acceptance and prematurely moving on. I think Caitlin Horrocks' writing pinpoints the journey girls take into becoming women. As we spoke of in class, women tend to criticize other women. In the context of this story, it would be girls tend to criticize other girls as a form of acceptance. As the narrator reflects on the memories from 6th grade, I was taken off guard as a reader. The cruelty of tween girls is the worst. Everyone remembers middle school's social challenges. The scene in the story from the girls locker room was just awful as the girls tossed Hanna's wig around. The narrator describes Hanna's appearance as "wearing an awful wig, stiff and styled like an old woman’s perm. The hair will be dark brown, not black, and will no longer match her eyes. She will be pale, with her face swollen, and she will not seem like someone I can afford to know." When she says how she cannot afford to know Hanna anymore, she is worrying about her reputation and part of the popular clique. Even though the narrator was a young girl, she felt no need to help her so-called friend and focused selfishly on herself and reputation. When the story concludes at a later point of the narrator's life, I thought it was interesting how Caitlin Horrocks created a character with had twin girls, who possibly were going to succumb to cancer as well. This was a little too ironic for my taste, but gave the narrator a dose of karma.