Category Archives: opinion

Initial Thoughts on Wee Free Men

Summary:
A girl named Tiffany discovers she is a witch and must rescue her brother from an evil queen. Tiffany gets help from little blue men and learns to navigate between dreams and reality.

Positives:
Pratchett creates a quirky voice for Tiffany with lots of witty puns and unusual similes/metaphors.
The Nac Mac Feegles are one-of-a-kind characters and rather endearing.

Negatives:
The Queen really wasn’t all that threatening.
The world was not particularly engaging for a fantasy novel. Not very vivid. Not a place I want to travel to.
The stories about Granny Aching were boring.

Initial Thoughts on Meatloaf

Clever and original concept. Kids will love looking though this scrapbook style collection of notes and objects to figure out the story. 

However, I think the format of the book causes the book to become dated VERY, VERY quickly. The IM chat screens looked ancient. The pop culture references via magazines and the interests of the girl also made the book feel dated. Example: The girl wants to be the Sugar Plum Fairy in a ballet production. Comes off as very cliche and traditional. What about soccer, basketball, lacrosse, volleyball, or one of the many sports the modern girl participates in? 

I don’t know how to do a book like this and keep it timeless. It would be a serious challenge. 

I’d also like to see this concept applied with cultural diversity in mind. Meatloaf and ballerinas and science fair projects… screams white suburbia. 

The graphic layout/style would really appeal to English Language Learners and lower socioeconomic kids.

Initial Thoughts on Nomansland

I was so optimistic about this book that I chose to read it first.  Reviews compared it to The Giver.  The cover reminded me of Katniss in Hunger Games.  But sadly this book did not live up to either for me.

What the book is about:
In a future world, some sort of nuclear disaster has caused worldwide destruction and poverty.  Most people are left mutated by the radiation and struggling to survive.  There is an island of all women who are untainted by radiation and guard their island against the outside world.  The girls live by a strict code of rules and have no memories of how the world used to be.  They fear men and the mutants.


Why I think my professor chose this book:
I’m trying to think like my professor and analyze why tis book would be a good representation of sci-fi YA (particularly sci-fi that looks at gender).  This book is designed to promote feminist discussion.  It’s the major theme of the book: feminism.  That’s one reason why I think he chose it.  Another possible reason (and one of the only things I found interesting) was how the future people in the book described objects from the past.  Example: A large flat screen TV mystified the girls as there was no electricity, and they did not know what it did.  So they described it as a gray glass window that does not show you the view outside.  These descriptions were interesting because the reader would be trying to guess what object was being described, and from a sci-fi writer’s viewpoint you wonder how you would attempt to describe unknown objects from the past.

Why I did not particularly like the book:
The book was very dark and depressing.  Suicide, drugs, murder.  Not what I normally choose to read.  I like my dystopian lit books, but I still want to be rooting for my main character.  I still want the dystopian world to be intriguing.  I found the setting to be desolate and dull.  I felt no connection with Keller.  I did not find this to be a page turner at all.  There were some strange passages that described nipples and nudity.  And I really would never recommend this book to a teen I teach.  I would feel uncomfortable doing so because of the subject matter in the book (drugs, nudity, suicide, murder, anti-Christianity, rape).  I’d imagine many adults would feel similarly, and that will make this book a hard sell to school and libraries.  The only similarity to The Giver is that the book is about a strict dystopian society and written in unflowery, simple prose.  Perhaps Keller is a little like Katniss in that they both make tough decisions, are forced into roles they don’t want, and show leadership qualities.  But I didn’t care much about Keller.  I did care about Katniss.

What I wish this book had delved deeper into:
The relationships between the “pure” women who have been unaffected by radiation and the outside world.  More discovery about the mutant men who visit the island.  More about Ms. Windsor, her leadership, and the state of her people.  More about the disaster that created this world.

Thoughts on Stephenie Meyer

A lot of people (especially writers) give Stephenie Meyer a hard time. And rightfully so, her books are not terribly well written and Breaking Dawn makes me want to hurl.

HOWEVER

I do think you have to examine any extremely successful person and examine why they were able to stand out among the crowd. She DID get published. She HAS made millions. So she must have done a few things right.

Here are my guesses as to why Meyer had such success:

Timing
I think Harry Potter had a very large female reader population who was left with nothing once that series finished. All these girls/young women were looking for a nice chunky book series to fill a hole. I think Meyer was lucky enough to fill that niche.

First Love
A huge aspect of why Meyer has been so successful is that she was able to recreate what it feels like to fall in love that first time. You can argue with me all you want, but I really do think she did this well. Though, this is also what makes her writing poor because in order to capture this feeling, she did things like describe Edward’s eyes 876,253 times (I made that number up, but you get the point.) All the repetitious descriptions of Edward, while poor writing, do take girls back to when they were teenagers where they would obsess over that one boy. From doodling his name over and over and over. To memorizing where he’d be at different parts of he school day. The repetition of her writing reminds us what it was like to be all-consumed by thoughts of one person.

Love Triangle
I don’t think the series would have been nearly as successful without Jacob. If the books had just been about Bella and Edward, it would have sizzled out much earlier. The smartest choice Meyer ever made was to put Edward on the backburner for book 2 and take the time to develop Jacob’s character. And then, what she did was make two characters that are such polar opposites. I must say that she did a good job in making both characters so different, but still making them both lovable. Edward being uptight, cold, protective, dangerous. Jacob being a fun-loving, warm, honest, comforting. I really do think she did a good job of developing these two characters. They are the ones that drive the stories.

Soooooo… Yeah, Stephenie Meyer is no Shakespeare. Yeah, her last book is a joke and she doesn’t know how to end a series. Yeah, there are better writers out there who deserve to make more money than she does. But the reading population doesn’t buy books based on how well written they are. Meyer is a commercial/popular writer who found a niche, created a brand, and milked it for all its worth. She found a subject with mass appeal.

And so I think a lot of the writers who criticize her have been bitten by jealousy. But if you want to make money off your writing, it’s not just how pretty your words sound, you have to consider your audience. Does this have mass appeal or is it too edgy? You have to think about it. Meyer hit on a idea with mass appeal, and then gave her audience what they wanted most.

And yes, I will admit I saw Eclipse last night. And yes, I enjoyed every minute of it. (Though that will probably be the last Twilight movie I enjoy.)