flyingobjects

[ETA: I read a news item about the author, and I feel compelled to say this: the author seems like a really, really cool woman. The kind of teacher you'd love to have, or visiting teaching companion, or whatever. She even supports The King's English, an independent bookstore in SLC! So, I hope she sort of refines her voice, I suppose. A screenplay, maybe? Adult fiction? Non-fiction? Journalism? All sorts of genres could suit her better than this. Also, I don't hate this in the way I hate a Stieg Larsson novel or Bruce Willis movies, not in an F-minus-minus way. Just a D+ way. I'd give it 1.5 if I could, is what I'm saying.] Oh, where to begin. I don't know what made me want to get this book. I think it's its attractive cover design. Just pause to look at that cover. I'll even go get the book. (Gets book.) Theresa Evangelista was the graphic designer, and she did a hell of a good job, because she sold me on a book I don't like, a book that is stupid and vapid and dull, a book that she probably could have written herself. I am not a teen-dystopia hater by nature. Look, I was at the IMAX of I Am Number Four faster than you can say "Dianna Agron," capisce? I don't think new books are necessarily worse than old books, that teen books have any less merit than adult books. But books need good dialogue. It's late, and I should go to sleep, but here is what I mean: "Matched," random page (114): "My legs ache a little: I look straight ahead and will myself to see Grandfather's face within my mind, to hold it there . . . My parents talk upstairs. My brother does his schoolwork and I run to nowhere." UGH. No one talks like this! No good narrator is this mechanical, this syntactically awkward, this repetitive. NO ONE says "Grandfather" instead of "Grandpa," or half-assed "poetic" phrases like "run to nowhere." Save it for Bieber's opening act. You could sing the last line there to an All-American Rejects song, and that ain't a good sign for a book. Now to turn to the same random page in a GOOD book: "'Our only course is to recover the book from Byng.' 'How do you propose to do that?' He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells began to stir." See? FUNNY. CHARMING. Natural. Witty. Referencing Poirot! I will do this in my best Ally Condie voice: "I thought that we had really ought to get that book from Stephanie Byng, Stephanie, whom I've referenced before. I told him as much. That made him frown. He was pondering." Good prose is like good food (or dare I say, pornography, chief justice?)...I know it when I see it. Condie has bad syntax, Wodehouse good. She strings along her sentences with an "and then, and then, and then" whereas someone like Agatha Christie has discovered something called coordinating conjunctions. In a book like Madame Bovary, you keep reading, because you care. Who is this dorky doctor, why did Emma marry him, what about this splendidly described feast? Look, all fiction is fake. Therefore, it's kind of astounding we care at all. That's why you need to build up a world we can believe in. Characters who breathe with verisimilitude. Witty or strange or moving dialogue. SOMETHING. I assume Ms. Condie is Mormon. (Didn't notice her provenance when I purchased the work.) I am coming to believe the death knells that are sounded about Mormon literature. It does seem to lack depth. It does seem forced and amateurish and cheesy. This is just Jack Weyland meets The Giver. Sorry, Theresa Evangelista. (I link her website here: http://www.tevangelista.com/covers.html seriously, this cover is like some kind of magic serum of graphic design. Me likey.) But sometimes old maxims about book covers and judging hold true,

2020-08-21 16:23