Monday, February 4, 2008

Oh my . . .

Anyone want to weigh in on this? (I'm thinking some of you might take issue with "I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers.") GalleyCat had a nice response already.

3 comments:

A.S. King said...

I'll be twitching for a few days after reading that.
I don't understand - weren't book reviewers asking for writers' support only a few months ago because their jobs are disappearing? This kind of stuff makes it awfully hard. If you want to give a book a bad review, that's fine...but to toss a whole gaggle of writers out because you reckon they are only doing what they do to be like JKR? Um, that's nuts. And I LOVE the line "genuine grown-up readers." AH yes. Genuine grown up readers. Because those teens, you know, aren't genuine.

See? See what you've done? Now you know why I don't watch the news and barely step out of my cave.

Amy

Maggie Stiefvater said...

Grrrrrr. It's this kind of high fallutin' stuck-up rhetoric that made me give the finger to my English professors in college and become a novelist in the first place.

What's the expression? "kissing to be clever?" The most annoying line to me, in the entire review, is when he praises Nail Gaiman's work INTERWORLD but says sadly, "But its prose is often only functional."

Sometimes, functional is what you need. To use an art metaphor, sometimes we need utter darkness to highlight that bit of light in the composition. If the whole book is so damn arty, yet more beautiful language is lost upon the reader.

Grrr, again. I'm off to write more prose which will undoubtedly be merely functional.

Carrie Harris said...

Doesn't he have this bass-ackwards? YA is EXACTLY the place we ought to be pushing the proverbial literary envelope. We need MORE material that will get teens to think about what the world is and what they want it to be (whilst being entertained by a rollocking good story, of course). I hate it when people underestimate kids. At the risk of sounding like a bad 80's tune, I believe that children are our future...

Man, that song is going to be stuck in my head the rest of the day.

Carrie Harris