Current Media: Penny Dreadful and Fangirl (spoilers for the book)
My two most recent pieces of media consumption are...not much alike.
I've been slowly working through Penny Dreadful, which is wonderful and bloody and crazed over the top gothic and sometimes silly and sometimes I have to just listen to things happen while my phone is under some blankets, and thank goodness I got the warning on some moments before I came to them so I could take the blanket precaution. I've got two more episodes to go - they're downloading now - and am interested to see where season 2 goes. And also, Eva Green commits to things, yo. She does not half-ass one damn thing.
And I've also just read Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl for book club. I didn't realize she was the author of the book Eleanor and Park, which has had a lot of buzz recently, but I knew about this one because I follow the artist who did the cover (and have an Avengers print from that artist that my sister bought me last Christmas). The book was heftier than I thought it would be, and I enjoyed it, but was rather disappointed that the setting, which happens to be my current place of residence, was so lightly sketched out when the author is a native of the state and apparently grew up in the larger city about 50 miles away. But while there were a lot of gestures towards establishing a sense of place, it never happened. It's probably because she was trawling through emotional terrain and had nothing to spare for the physical, which, fair enough, I suppose.
Anyway, I liked the book a lot, even though some of the mental illness stuff was played...well, I don't know. Let's just say that I've read some reviews of the book that are all, "aww, Cath's father is so cuddly and I fell in love with him and he was the best so snarky wonderful" and I wondered if people just don't understand how difficult living with a person prone to manic episodes and doing things like locking themselves in rooms and not eating and writing messages on the mirror. I guess I feel like there was a lot of difficult emotional stuff in the book - one twin acting out in a big way, one twin with a truly severe anxiety disorder that is kinda played off as cute, a father with bipolar and a mother who said "fuck this" and left her eight-year-olds as she adioses out the door...it's there, and it's given some emotional weight, but the hospital scenes are, well, I don't know..,perhaps it's too much to ask for in what is apparently a YA book and I can't decide if I feel that if you bring up these topics you have to attack them a little more or if the lighter touch was actually more appropriate because it just presents it and leaves it for you.
Oh, and I'm not sure I liked the whole "insert chunks of Cath's fanfic in-between the chapters" stuff. It felt a little gratuitous.
On the other hand, a book that made me think about it this much probably means it's well-done enough to evoke the thinking, so that's another point in its favor. You can also add the facts that the book is genuinely charming, covers a lot of interesting stuff about the craft of writing. and kept my attention enough to tear through it.
This entry was originally posted at http://sienamystic.dreamwidth.org/460647.html. Please comment here or there using OpenID.
I've been slowly working through Penny Dreadful, which is wonderful and bloody and crazed over the top gothic and sometimes silly and sometimes I have to just listen to things happen while my phone is under some blankets, and thank goodness I got the warning on some moments before I came to them so I could take the blanket precaution. I've got two more episodes to go - they're downloading now - and am interested to see where season 2 goes. And also, Eva Green commits to things, yo. She does not half-ass one damn thing.
And I've also just read Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl for book club. I didn't realize she was the author of the book Eleanor and Park, which has had a lot of buzz recently, but I knew about this one because I follow the artist who did the cover (and have an Avengers print from that artist that my sister bought me last Christmas). The book was heftier than I thought it would be, and I enjoyed it, but was rather disappointed that the setting, which happens to be my current place of residence, was so lightly sketched out when the author is a native of the state and apparently grew up in the larger city about 50 miles away. But while there were a lot of gestures towards establishing a sense of place, it never happened. It's probably because she was trawling through emotional terrain and had nothing to spare for the physical, which, fair enough, I suppose.
Anyway, I liked the book a lot, even though some of the mental illness stuff was played...well, I don't know. Let's just say that I've read some reviews of the book that are all, "aww, Cath's father is so cuddly and I fell in love with him and he was the best so snarky wonderful" and I wondered if people just don't understand how difficult living with a person prone to manic episodes and doing things like locking themselves in rooms and not eating and writing messages on the mirror. I guess I feel like there was a lot of difficult emotional stuff in the book - one twin acting out in a big way, one twin with a truly severe anxiety disorder that is kinda played off as cute, a father with bipolar and a mother who said "fuck this" and left her eight-year-olds as she adioses out the door...it's there, and it's given some emotional weight, but the hospital scenes are, well, I don't know..,perhaps it's too much to ask for in what is apparently a YA book and I can't decide if I feel that if you bring up these topics you have to attack them a little more or if the lighter touch was actually more appropriate because it just presents it and leaves it for you.
Oh, and I'm not sure I liked the whole "insert chunks of Cath's fanfic in-between the chapters" stuff. It felt a little gratuitous.
On the other hand, a book that made me think about it this much probably means it's well-done enough to evoke the thinking, so that's another point in its favor. You can also add the facts that the book is genuinely charming, covers a lot of interesting stuff about the craft of writing. and kept my attention enough to tear through it.
This entry was originally posted at http://sienamystic.dreamwidth.org/460647.html. Please comment here or there using OpenID.