Cassandra Claire - making good?
The other day in the bookstore, right outside the cafe where I was bound with my haul of books, I noticed a copy of Cassandra Claire's City of Bones and, driven by morbid curiousity, picked it up.
For those of you not familiar with Harry Potter fandom (lucky you!), once upon a time, CC was the BNF to end all BNFs - she was the biggest fanfic author in the fandom, by far. Her status rested on the Draco Trilogy - a trio of ginormously long and hideously popular fanfics with Draco Malfoy as the main character (as she is responsible for Draco as sexy leather-pants-wearing-stud, I may never forgive her). In terms of my personal preferences in Harry Potter, DT was basically the polar opposite - cult of Draco, Harry/Hermione, etc. Yet, despite it, I confess that I was addicted to DT almost a decade ago (yes, it was a long time). I eventually lost interest in it when the third and final part of her trilogy kept getting longer and longer and the time between updates got longer and longer as well, and I never finished it. (I must say, I remain impressed with the fact that CC eventually completed it - a lot of BNF fanfics go on forever and never get done).
This is the good part. Now the not so good. I was not in the Potter fandom as it had too many crazies for my liking, but I do know that CC had as many huge scandals as she had popularity (ahhhh, the BNF drama!) There was plagiarism - apparently she routinely lifted chunks of dialogue from Buffy, Red Dwarf etc without crediting (I don't really care about that but a lot of people were upset. It was that kerfuffle that introduced me to Buffy so I will always be grateful.) There was getting expensive gifts from fangirls under false pretenses. There was the general "I am queen of the world, worship me" attitude at cons.
As a result of all of this, and the fact that CC wanted to get published, she took her fic off the web (you can still find it though) and disappeared from the fandom.
And then she published her own YA fantasy fiction trilogy, of which City of Bones is the first part.
I tried CoB a long time ago and gave up a few pages in - it just felt like an overwrought hard slog (going back to DT, I remember plenty of overwroughtness there too. I think I used to like it more when I was younger though). A sort of too-many-crystallized-adjectives thing. I know CC exhibited good taste and liked Dunnett (my second-favorite writer of all time) but Dunnett is one of the very few authors who CAN pull off that ornate style - in CC's hands it just comes across as a bit incoherent.
But being a tenacious sort, I decided to give CoB another chance, shamefully swayed by the fact that in the meantime I found out that at one point the heroine and her OTP believe they are brother and sister with much angsting. Kdramas, what have you done to me!
So I tried again. The beginning is still a ridiculously hard slog - it does not flow at all. But then, about 50 pages in, it picks up and it's been great good fun since then - I don't really want to put it down, in fact.
Which is YAY! I have never cared about personalities of writers - have you heard some of the things Gogol used to espouse? Or a whole plethora of Soviet authors I used to love?
All I care is that I found a book I enjoy reading.
CC can be a plagiarizing, manipulative ***** for all I care - as long as her books entertain me.
For those of you not familiar with Harry Potter fandom (lucky you!), once upon a time, CC was the BNF to end all BNFs - she was the biggest fanfic author in the fandom, by far. Her status rested on the Draco Trilogy - a trio of ginormously long and hideously popular fanfics with Draco Malfoy as the main character (as she is responsible for Draco as sexy leather-pants-wearing-stud, I may never forgive her). In terms of my personal preferences in Harry Potter, DT was basically the polar opposite - cult of Draco, Harry/Hermione, etc. Yet, despite it, I confess that I was addicted to DT almost a decade ago (yes, it was a long time). I eventually lost interest in it when the third and final part of her trilogy kept getting longer and longer and the time between updates got longer and longer as well, and I never finished it. (I must say, I remain impressed with the fact that CC eventually completed it - a lot of BNF fanfics go on forever and never get done).
This is the good part. Now the not so good. I was not in the Potter fandom as it had too many crazies for my liking, but I do know that CC had as many huge scandals as she had popularity (ahhhh, the BNF drama!) There was plagiarism - apparently she routinely lifted chunks of dialogue from Buffy, Red Dwarf etc without crediting (I don't really care about that but a lot of people were upset. It was that kerfuffle that introduced me to Buffy so I will always be grateful.) There was getting expensive gifts from fangirls under false pretenses. There was the general "I am queen of the world, worship me" attitude at cons.
As a result of all of this, and the fact that CC wanted to get published, she took her fic off the web (you can still find it though) and disappeared from the fandom.
And then she published her own YA fantasy fiction trilogy, of which City of Bones is the first part.
I tried CoB a long time ago and gave up a few pages in - it just felt like an overwrought hard slog (going back to DT, I remember plenty of overwroughtness there too. I think I used to like it more when I was younger though). A sort of too-many-crystallized-adjectives thing. I know CC exhibited good taste and liked Dunnett (my second-favorite writer of all time) but Dunnett is one of the very few authors who CAN pull off that ornate style - in CC's hands it just comes across as a bit incoherent.
But being a tenacious sort, I decided to give CoB another chance, shamefully swayed by the fact that in the meantime I found out that at one point the heroine and her OTP believe they are brother and sister with much angsting. Kdramas, what have you done to me!
So I tried again. The beginning is still a ridiculously hard slog - it does not flow at all. But then, about 50 pages in, it picks up and it's been great good fun since then - I don't really want to put it down, in fact.
Which is YAY! I have never cared about personalities of writers - have you heard some of the things Gogol used to espouse? Or a whole plethora of Soviet authors I used to love?
All I care is that I found a book I enjoy reading.
CC can be a plagiarizing, manipulative ***** for all I care - as long as her books entertain me.