Having read a book, some words.
Some day, aye, you will walk into a room, or a car, or an aeroplane, or a toilet, and you won't know it right then - but you will never get back out again. Exit only. Fact.
That's possibly one of the lighter passages from Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon, a book that had me gripped right up until page 290 of its ~320 page length. Where it lost me, it lost me for much the same reason that Requiem for a Dream did - it reached a point where it was just too unrelentingly fucking grim to stomach.
For maybe four pages there, it was just a bit too much. And it didn't quite stick the ending - one ending was given, which would've been an ideal place to close on, but there was still another chapter to round things off, which felt kind of superfluous. Nowhere near LotR-style excesses of endings, but still, felt like one too many.
Other issues - it started off reading like YA. The only thing to challenge that reading for a long time was the excessive use of the word 'cunt'. Other than that? Totally read like a YA book. And I struggled to figure out why, at first. To take a counter-example, The Testament of Jessie Lamb didn't read like YA to me when I read that, even though that's similarly narrated by a teenaged character.
After some thought, I think the answer comes down to the voice. The The Panopticon is narrated entirely from the perspective of the main character; we inhabit her head for the whole of the novel, and everything is seen through her perspective. A perspective that is a hallmark of YA novels, in my experience - this happens then that happens and then so on, all from POV of narrator. There's no point where the narrator steps outside to look at things from a wider perspective (either in-character or as some kind of narrative device). Jessie Lamb, on the other hand, does have sections where it steps outside.
Still. I'm open to argument on that point, really. It just struck me, personally, as kind of weird that I was reading it as YA, given that I'm usually the person strongly on the "just because it has a teen character doesn't mean it has to get the YA label" side of the argument.
One last thing; I've no idea how it got shortlisted for the Kitschies, mind. They can hide behind the word 'progressive' all they want, but, given that they are basically SF awards, that every other book ever shortlisted is arguably SF, this one sticks out like a sore thumb. It's entirely realist, not SF at all, doesn't fit with the others in the slightest. Bizarre.
That's possibly one of the lighter passages from Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon, a book that had me gripped right up until page 290 of its ~320 page length. Where it lost me, it lost me for much the same reason that Requiem for a Dream did - it reached a point where it was just too unrelentingly fucking grim to stomach.
For maybe four pages there, it was just a bit too much. And it didn't quite stick the ending - one ending was given, which would've been an ideal place to close on, but there was still another chapter to round things off, which felt kind of superfluous. Nowhere near LotR-style excesses of endings, but still, felt like one too many.
Other issues - it started off reading like YA. The only thing to challenge that reading for a long time was the excessive use of the word 'cunt'. Other than that? Totally read like a YA book. And I struggled to figure out why, at first. To take a counter-example, The Testament of Jessie Lamb didn't read like YA to me when I read that, even though that's similarly narrated by a teenaged character.
After some thought, I think the answer comes down to the voice. The The Panopticon is narrated entirely from the perspective of the main character; we inhabit her head for the whole of the novel, and everything is seen through her perspective. A perspective that is a hallmark of YA novels, in my experience - this happens then that happens and then so on, all from POV of narrator. There's no point where the narrator steps outside to look at things from a wider perspective (either in-character or as some kind of narrative device). Jessie Lamb, on the other hand, does have sections where it steps outside.
Still. I'm open to argument on that point, really. It just struck me, personally, as kind of weird that I was reading it as YA, given that I'm usually the person strongly on the "just because it has a teen character doesn't mean it has to get the YA label" side of the argument.
One last thing; I've no idea how it got shortlisted for the Kitschies, mind. They can hide behind the word 'progressive' all they want, but, given that they are basically SF awards, that every other book ever shortlisted is arguably SF, this one sticks out like a sore thumb. It's entirely realist, not SF at all, doesn't fit with the others in the slightest. Bizarre.