Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Finished Reading

Jaleigh Johnson’s The Mark of the Dragonfly, which never quite gelled for me, unfortunately. The premise of a world where objects from other worlds fall out of the sky intrigued me, but the book doesn’t end up doing much with it - the objects don’t seem to have had any real effect on the world’s culture, except as curios

Comments

[asakiyume]

I'll be waiting with bated breath for your take on The Goblin Emperor.

It's so **frustrating** when a book has a cool idea, and then the story doesn't do the idea justice. I can see how it happens. I sometimes get cool ideas, but if I can't construct a good story around them, I let them lie for precisely that reason. Kraken was an example of a story with a superfluity of cool ideas, and they were even pretty coolly portrayed... and yet the story didn't support them well enough, to my mind. Whereas, Railsea, for me, did it perfectly: had cool ideas that were justified in the story, and well used in the story--integral.

I agree with you about the shoehorning in of romance. Imagine if there were some other arbitrary requirement--like what if all YA novels had to have a scene where a person rolls up their jean (has to be jeans) and reveals interesting socks. Imagine if in any book, we had to see how this element was brought in. Sometimes I feel like romance has about as much necessity.

[osprey_archer]

There's nothing worse than a book with a cool idea that doesn't live up to it. I remember reading a book about a boy who had a bunch of cupboards in his bedroom, all of which led to different worlds. How could that be anything but marvelous? But the writing felt so mechanical, there was no sense of wonder. I was so sad.

A badly shoe-horned romance can stop the plot just as effectively as a "look at my socks!" scene could. Even when the romances are fairly well-done, I'm often left with a niggling sense that it's there because publishers require it, not because the story or the characters really needed it. I liked Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races a lot, for instance, and the romance develops much more naturally than in The Mark of the Dragonfly...but at the same time, I think the book would be stronger without it, because it leaches page time away from everything else.