** spoiler alert ** I've heard good things about this book, so decided to try it, even though I can't stand the YA books that use supernatural exoticism (vampires, fairies) as a stand-in for actual compelling drama.
I stopped reading this. It's a YA romance set in a supernatural world, but the romance is one of those "he stares at her across the room but she doesn't know he exists" type things that does nothing for me. It's not a story. And the heroine is in love with a wolf she doesn't know is anything but a wolf, which is just problematic all kinds of ways.
Sure, we know how it's going to work out, but how is that a recommendation?
YA SF needs to pull itself together and stop letting exoticism replace compelling drama. You can have both! You should always write a story that would be amazing even if the characters were plain old boring humans. If it's relying on fairies or vampires or werewolves to be interesting, then it's not a good story.
That said, the writing was gorgeous and vivid. I would love to see this author write more! But without the crutch of the supernatural. Authors really do the genre a disservice by failing to hold themselves to high standards of story independent of the supernatural.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment! I'd love to hear from you.