Story on the Brain

I don't read much fantasy. I find a lot of it poorly thought out and derivative to the point of absurdity. You know, smiths who make swords, but nobody is mining anything, that sort of thing. Huge armies with no way to support them. Impractical romanticizing and fetishizing of a particular pre-industrial moment in human history, but without all of the negatives that would imply.  Point being, this is one of the rare fantasy books I've read over and over.  Mirasol gets the role of Chalice because some rods (???) divined that she's the one. And she definitely is. Her bees suddenly make enormous quantities of honey, her goats are producing prodigious quantities of milk, and some mead in the cellar overflows and fills the whole space and smells up her house so much that she has to sleep outside. This is why I love Robin McKinley for fantasy. She's practical and grounded and knows how things actually work. So maybe that's what I dislike about most fantasy. It's full ...

I remember loving these books as a child but I had forgotten how much I skipped over. Re-reading childhood favorites is dangerous, but in the case of the Dark Is Rising books, you really should not do it. What I loved was the Drew children, because Stone Over Sea is a wonderful book and I kept reading to get more of them. But everything having to do with Will Stanton was so outrageously irritating, I nearly didn't finish the fifth book, Silver on the Tree . Good lord. He magically gets all these outrageous powers with no effort, then is a rarefied Old One and crucial to the survival of the world. First, I hate it when people get superpowers without any cost. Second, Will is boring. He doesn't have to fight for anything. Third, his powers are awfully convenient, or inconvenient, and that's just annoying. Every E. Nesbit book is infinitely more careful about powers and rules and costs than these books. Silver On the Tree was the worst offender, followed closel...

This is a shorter analysis because I truly despised this awful book. Don't read this if you liked the novel. You have been warned.  ***** If you think smoking, drinking, drugs, vomit, crime, and cruelty are cool, this is the book for you. The writing is gorgeous, if exhausting and overblown, but it's in the service of the most atrocious characters. The plot is strong but inflated to easily triple the size it needed to be, maybe quadruple. The narrative dribbles along in slow motion and is full of pointlessly baroque scenes and entire massive chapters that go nowhere. Pace your work, writers of the world. The main character is by far the worst thing about the book, after all the vomit. Have I mentioned the endless vomit scenes? He has no spine and makes no decisions and in no way drives the story. All he does is lie around being squalid, very nearly ruins the life of the kind man who took him in when he was homeless, and follows others around doing whatever they want ...

I have a whole row of candy-colored Meg Cabot books on my shelf, but the three "Boy" books are my favorites. The Boy Next Door , Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy's Got One. They're epistolary in the sense that they're built out of journal entries, email, messaging, voicemail, letters, notes, even documents from office work.  The Boy Next Door tells its story through conversations between Mel Fuller, a newspaper columnist, and her friends and co-workers, as she works through finding her neighbor unconscious, the victim of an assault, and tries to take care of the neighbor's Great Dane and two cats with the help of a man she thinks is the neighbor's relative. He isn't--and they fall in love--which is the twist that drives much of the drama of the book.  I'm interested in the epistolary format for something I'm writing myself, so I wanted to dig into these three books and see what works and what doesn't.  Epistolary is brilliant for lies and for cont...