Stress stress
Okay I know that like rule one of Author Club is "don't bitch about negative reviews" (actually that's probably rule 2, I think rule 1 might be "don't bitch about rejection letters") but ugh, okay, it's been more than a week since I read this one review at goodreads and I'm still thinking about it every day and getting stressed about it. Full text behind the cut:
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I really wanted to like this book.
An Australian author, writing female characters and using an Australian setting? Indigenous, trans and queer characters? Music references? Sounds great.
Unfortunately, too much time is spent on some of the interweaving storylines (especially if you count the information about young female killers as a storyline) and not enough on others; ultimately, this book tries to do a lot of really interesting things but doesn't have enough time to make them as interesting as they deserve to be. Some of the rare or marginalised character types were dealt with so briefly that they felt tokenistic, and I felt uncomfortable about how the Aboriginal characters (major and incidental) and their mythologies were handled.
However, the main issue that I had with the book is likely the very thing that makes it appeal so strongly to some other reviewers: the writing style is one that I associate strongly with the fanfiction community, in not only its works but its general discourse. Not having been involved in the community, and with most of my experiences of said style involving some very poor writing, this really makes the writing miss the mark for me.
It's also fair to say that while the multiple POV characters have the potential to add depth and texture to the work, they lack unique voices. Even the excerpts from (fictional) music journalism come across as simply more of the author's own voice, and characters talk to each other and themselves in the same way across the various time periods that the book covers.
Two stars rather than one, because there were some nice ideas here and I think a more mature version, perhaps in series form rather than a single book, would be very impressive.
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It's not that it's a low-starred review, because I've had those before. It's that every criticism is something I'm terribly afraid of -- this reads like a checklist of 'every way in which I always assumed someone would expose me for the shitty hack I am'.
Tokenistic, racist against Indigenous Australians, writes like bad fanfiction writer, bland and non-unique character voices. It's everything I was terrified this book would turn out to be because I wasn't good enough to write it properly, and the last paragraph essentially says 'if someone else wrote it, it'd be good'.
I just feel really sick and sad and stressed out. How do I keep on writing when everything I was afraid might be true, is?
Ugh crying again what fun
This entry was originally posted over here and has
comments at the moment.
--
I really wanted to like this book.
An Australian author, writing female characters and using an Australian setting? Indigenous, trans and queer characters? Music references? Sounds great.
Unfortunately, too much time is spent on some of the interweaving storylines (especially if you count the information about young female killers as a storyline) and not enough on others; ultimately, this book tries to do a lot of really interesting things but doesn't have enough time to make them as interesting as they deserve to be. Some of the rare or marginalised character types were dealt with so briefly that they felt tokenistic, and I felt uncomfortable about how the Aboriginal characters (major and incidental) and their mythologies were handled.
However, the main issue that I had with the book is likely the very thing that makes it appeal so strongly to some other reviewers: the writing style is one that I associate strongly with the fanfiction community, in not only its works but its general discourse. Not having been involved in the community, and with most of my experiences of said style involving some very poor writing, this really makes the writing miss the mark for me.
It's also fair to say that while the multiple POV characters have the potential to add depth and texture to the work, they lack unique voices. Even the excerpts from (fictional) music journalism come across as simply more of the author's own voice, and characters talk to each other and themselves in the same way across the various time periods that the book covers.
Two stars rather than one, because there were some nice ideas here and I think a more mature version, perhaps in series form rather than a single book, would be very impressive.
--
It's not that it's a low-starred review, because I've had those before. It's that every criticism is something I'm terribly afraid of -- this reads like a checklist of 'every way in which I always assumed someone would expose me for the shitty hack I am'.
Tokenistic, racist against Indigenous Australians, writes like bad fanfiction writer, bland and non-unique character voices. It's everything I was terrified this book would turn out to be because I wasn't good enough to write it properly, and the last paragraph essentially says 'if someone else wrote it, it'd be good'.
I just feel really sick and sad and stressed out. How do I keep on writing when everything I was afraid might be true, is?
Ugh crying again what fun
This entry was originally posted over here and has
comments at the moment.