What exactly are you trying to say, book blurb?
I was offered a book for review, so I read the blurb. At first I thought it was just full of bad writing:
Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.
So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.
I wasn't interested in reading it, but the blurb made me frown enough that I wanted to find out more -- was it self-published? I was betting yes.
Turned out I was wrong. Not only was I wrong, the blurb is actually correct: A character does in fact turn inside out ("Another [character] has turned herself into a walking digestive tract."). "One character is building a helicopter that happens to be invisible."
I'm still not interested in reading the book, but at least I'm less frowny over it now.
--
In non-book news, my brain has come up with a new form of stress dream: Moving. Night after night, sometimes multiple times in a night, I go through the experience of having to pack up my whole apartment and move. There's always a twist, like last night, thinking I was all done packing, I threw out my extra boxes, then discovered a whole closet that I hadn't packed up.
I'm not even thinking about moving, so it's odd that my brain has fixated on that.
Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.
So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.
I wasn't interested in reading it, but the blurb made me frown enough that I wanted to find out more -- was it self-published? I was betting yes.
Turned out I was wrong. Not only was I wrong, the blurb is actually correct: A character does in fact turn inside out ("Another [character] has turned herself into a walking digestive tract."). "One character is building a helicopter that happens to be invisible."
I'm still not interested in reading the book, but at least I'm less frowny over it now.
--
In non-book news, my brain has come up with a new form of stress dream: Moving. Night after night, sometimes multiple times in a night, I go through the experience of having to pack up my whole apartment and move. There's always a twist, like last night, thinking I was all done packing, I threw out my extra boxes, then discovered a whole closet that I hadn't packed up.
I'm not even thinking about moving, so it's odd that my brain has fixated on that.