While I like Peewee Reisfield from Have Spaceship Will Travel, Podkayne is
an annoying, obnoxious, gushing, unconvincing teenage girl given over to
expressions such as "dandruff," "dirty ears," "spit," and "snel-frockey."
She writes unbelievable sentences such as "At first I thought my brother
Clark had managed one of his more charlatanous machinations of malevolent
legerdemain." Does any teenaged girl, even the most pretentious and purple
prosed, write like this? Nothing much happens for most of the
book--Podkayne and Clark get kidnapped and escape. I really can't bring
myself to reread the narrative for details as I find it the most unpleasant
of Heinlein's juveniles, almost ranking up there with Farnham's Freehold in
offensiveness. Podkayne aspires to be a space captain but is more a pain in
the a. Then, offensively, she learns to accept a woman's role, with her
coyly (she is extremely coy) cooing, "a baby is a lot more fun than
differential equations," as if the two are somehow mutually exclusive. A
pox on it.It is nothing but a load of snel-frockey.
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