Well. For whatever reason, you lot have voted for the book described as being genderflipped Twilight, because it wasn’t enough I had to do the Host for you monsters. So. Let’s descend.
The newer cover does not inspire confidence.
The acknowledgements includes all our casters & outcasters, everywhere. There are more of us than you think. I’m going to assume this is some New Age bullshit where there’s magic inside of us all and some of us, like emo teens, have more of it.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
So this is our opening quote. I’m actually not a fan of a lot of nice pacifist quotes, honestly – I mean, I generally agree it’s a good idea, but framing it like this seems dishonest. Darkness and hate totally can combat darkness and hate, it’s just not going to be too pleasant for anyone involved. It’s like how murder totally is a solution to murder. It can still be true it’s better to go with the non-murdery, non-hatey alternatives without needing to say the other option categorically fails, and when you set up your argument in this way, then if hate and darkness do work, apparently there’s no problem with it.
But anyway. Between this and the title, I’m thinking maybe we’re in for a tale about how prejudice is wrong? Doing that with vampires or anything else that can turn humans into chunky salsa tends to have issues. Actually, maybe this will be werewolves and the losing love interest can be a Native American vampire.
BEFORE
The Middle of Nowhere
On to the prologue! Main character’s dad describes their town as a hickville full only of dumb people and people who want to leave but can’t. Naturally his family is the good smart people who just can’t leave.
folks down here didn’t call it the Civil War. Everyone under the age of sixty called it the War Between the States, while everyone over sixty called it the War of Northern Aggression, as if somehow the North had baited the South into war over a bad bale of cotton. Everyone, that is, except my family. We called it the Civil War.
I mean, I’m as happy as anyone to laugh at the southern crying about how much their asses were kicked. But I’m not thrilled with presentation here. The character seems only to live there so they can wow us with how not-a-racist-hick they are, and also, calling the Civil War the Civil War is not exactly a big deal. You don’t get brownie points for it, and that, really, is the focus of the paragraph, how very good his family is.
And presumably this is a white guy talking, so it’s not even like this is something actually affecting him. A black kid thinking about how he can’t wait to get away from the racist assholes mourning that they can’t own him is different than a white kid thinking about how his dumb ancestor fought on the asshole side of the war and how much he hates being around the dumb people.
Gatlin wasn’t like the small towns you saw in the movies, unless it was a movie from about fifty years ago. We were too far from Charleston to have a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. All we had was a Dar-ee Keen, since the Gentrys were too cheap to buy all new letters when they bought the Dairy King.
It’s my understanding that small towns usually end up getting some of those precisely because they’re too far away from anything else and that makes them a captive audience.
Also not sure entirely sure what the sign joke is. Why did they buy some new letters?
The library still had a card catalog
Fuck you those are awesome.
the high school still had chalkboards
Yeah, some places still have those. In fact, most of the schools I’ve seen usually have at least a couple in rooms here and there, and some have a lot.
and our community pool was Lake Moultrie, warm brown water and all.
…?
And where I live the community swimming places are also open bodies of natural water is there a point here beyond that you’re really whiny?
You could see a movie at the Cineplex about the same time it came out on DVD
Okay, I go to the cheap theaters myself and really, they have faster turnaround. Also, who cares? Sometimes a movie theater will show much older movies just because it’s cool to see them on the big screen. We’ve been making movies for a hundred years now, there’s a lot of good stuff. If they can’t afford the new movies, they wouldn’t just be waiting for the DVD, they’d be showing all sorts of cool old movies and for much, much less than a DVD. I mean, if five dollars in an actual town where property values are high gets me a ticket and free snacks to see a movie just out of regular theaters, how much can it be to see something a year later out in Empty Hicksville?
Plus since there’s apparently nothing at all to do but go there, and there’s only one theater for a big area, I’d think they’d be doing okay for themselves.
the pavement disintegrated into chunky concrete stubble—terrible for walking, but perfect for throwing at angry possums, the meanest animals alive.
Are opossums just getting subbed in here because they’re the stereotypical hick animal? I have many fond memories of all the not biting me they’ve done. Most animals that size you have to be careful around just in case, but the most one’s ever done to me is slightly raise its lips off its fangs, and that was when I was poking its face with a stick. (It was for its own good.) Just last week my uncle left the door open and a baby one wandered into their house and fell asleep in the bathroom. They’re sweeties. I’m sure someone somewhere has managed to get bit by one, but I’m equally sure that someone completely deserved it.
I have admittedly not cuddled more southerly ones, but unless there’s a voodoo curse that makes opossums turn into murder machines as soon as you walk into the former Confederate states, I’m pretty sure they’re still just really stupid animals that snuffle around eating scraps and worms.
You want to talk about the meanest animal alive, how about snapping turtles? They’re basically rocks made of rage. And those are a perfectly good stereotypical hick animal too. (You still shouldn’t throw rocks at them.)
You never saw that in the movies.
I really wish people would think before they start going on about how REAL LIFE IS DIFFERENT THAN THE MOVIES in their fiction. The vicious opossum is one step removed from drop bears, okay? I mean, at least koalas actually hate you. Opossums couldn’t hate you even if they wanted to, they don’t have the brain cells for it.
Anyway, point is everything is very boring where he lives and he already knows what’ll happen everywhere because it’s so small and boring.
At least, that’s what I thought, when I closed my battered copy of Slaughterhouse-Five
Incidentally. I don’t deal much with cellphones, so I’m only passingly aware of them missing in stories where they should be. But I do deal with the internet, so it’s really weird to me to think of someone complaining about being bored and isolated and apparently liking to read and yet not just going online and reading. I mean, that’s mostly what got me into fanfic originally, it was an infinite free source of new stories to read. Much more enjoyable than Slaughterhouse-Five was. And if they’re so middle of nowhere they don’t even have internet, I’d expect at least as much bitching on the subject as we got for the movie theater.
Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.
I never even saw it coming.
You were insisting you knew everything that would happen down to the exact conversations that’d happen at school, so no shit you ended up wrong.
What is it with protagonists being huge douches in YA? Do people think it’s appealing to hear someone whine nonstop about how shitty life is? Is this a Twilight thing, where people don’t know why that took off but Bella was a raging bitch so better make our character a bitch too?
Also, fuck you authors, some people like living in small towns.
God I hate our culture.
Best I can tell, it’s an attempt to create a contrast between dull boring everyday life and an exiting adventure/romance/whatever for emotional impact. Kinda like the first twenty minutes of majority of horror films is just a bunch of idiots doing nothing of importance.
Or alternatively YA writers think that whiny protagonists are more relatable to the target audience because kids this days whine about everything and don’t know how good they have it.
I just started reading Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, and it handles the contrast just fine by spending a while on the main character’s happy small-town life where the kids are always fooling around and doing stuff together.
But I guess happiness isn’t allowed so that leaves us with the whining.
Happiness is uncool. Besides, protagonist being happy implies that he had a good life before supernatural shit hit him, and we can’t have it. Everyone knows that ordinary life is pathetic and meaningless, therefore achieving happiness without becoming supernatural or at least fucking supernatural creature is impossible.
I also have vague suspicions that his commentaries are supposed to be witty and funny.
On topic of Higurashi: I’ve watched the anime, liked the first season (the second, on the other hand, is a jumbled mess). Should I read the novels? I’ve heard that anime spoils just enough to not be worth it.
Also, if you are planning to read Umineko no Naku Koro ni (made by the same people, spiritual successor to Higurashi), try to avoid reading anything about it. All information inevitably spoils the first episode which is basically a long prologue establishing the scene, characters and the main conflict. Combined with slow pacing, it makes the episode pretty much unreadable.
Can’t say, I’m reading the manga! I’m only partway through and still have no idea what’s going on, so I can’t tell if the eventual reveal is going to be great or incoherent. I’m considering checking out the game as well.
There isn’t really a singular reveal in Higurashi. By my count, there
are three big secrets, though different people might break it up
differently. In any case, it’s such a complicated mystery that nearly
as much time is spent on reveals as on set-up (hence the second season
of the anime being called “Kei”), and some parts of it are better (and
more coherent) than others.
Only people who spend all their time talking about how the north was really to blame for the civil war and fending off murderous opossums, apparently! Maybe if you were COOL, like the main character, you’d know better!
“Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.
I never even saw it coming.”
Argh, I hate when writers do that. Inserting “exiting” teasers like this rarely works and usually just comes across as a pathetic plea “please, read my book, it’s interesting, I promise!”.
At least this book is written in first person. I’ve seen a few books in third person where writer just suddenly address readers in first person.
What’s particularly unimpressive is that it’s set up to be supernatural, so it’s hard to care about a grave because she’s probably just a vampire and he’ll dig her back up.
And if it isn’t and it really means to foreshadow this is all leading to tragedy, it’s failed to get this across.
Also, that cover bothers me for like 400 different reasons. Here are the top two.
1. Black person? Shove them off to the side where no one can see them.
2. SHE’S THE ONE WITH FUCKING SUPERPOWERS WHY IS *HE* BEING ALL PROTECTIVE OF *HER* FUCK YOU YA.
YA or Hollywood? It is a movie poster after all and not the original cover. Or fuck both I guess; Hollywood for making it and YA using it for the new cover.
It gave me all kinds of flashbacks to the first Hunger Games book where after saving his life a million times over Katniss spends nine chapters curling up in big, strong, Peeta’s arms because she is a weak little wimminz. Then again, Collins was a TV writer.
Well, seeing how well other YA romances have gone, maybe she figured out if she showed she knew her place she could skip over the bit where the guy shoves her around.
Actually a quick google search tells me that the book just never even mentions her race, so I guess Hollywood is being more progressive by portraying the implied black character as actual black, maybe?
In my experience, even media that admits the superpowered woman is the actual ass-kicker will still depict the guy being needed to save her at some point. The two are probably just recognizing that she’ll inevitably be depowered temporarily or something and need him to save her.
There really is a Lake Moultrie in South Carolina. It’s beautiful: http://www.dnr.sc.gov/lakes/moultrie/gallery.html
BEAUTY MEANS NOTHING ALL THAT MATTERS IS IT’S NOT A CEMENT POOL AND THEREFORE IT IS INFERIOR SMALL TOWN SHIT.
Ah, Farla, I think I love you for recapping everything that is wrong with this book. I bought it because JEREMY IRONS was on the cover, and I couldn’t finish it, even though I generally finish everything.
This book being turned into a film cannot fail to be a waste of Jeremy Irons.
There seem to be two modes of YA protagonist, horrible and painfully naive. You usually see the latter in dystopian fiction, but rarely ever embodied in a male protagonist for presumably horrible reasons.
By the way, I used to call myself Zolnier around here.
Wait, why are comments actually working now? Commenting here to say opossums are all sweeties. They’re very docile and timid and pretty much never bite unless you are actively killing it. I’ve had a lot of experience with them. They’re cuties.