Oh, please do comment on older posts. I like to talk about books.
mizchalmers and I were talking about this on her review of The God Box: I think most of what you're criticizing here are weaknesses of the YA genre. Not much development of side-characters, writing like there's a strict length constraint and thus cutting out the stuff that would make it a richer novel (there probably is a marketing/publisher-imposed length constraint; the genre acts like there is one, anyway), having characters introduce themselves as one-dimensional stereotypes so that we can then have a Very Important Lesson in not judging by stereotype...
I dunno, maybe I should put a THIS IS VERY YA-LIKE YA, AND CARRIES MANY OF THE COMMON FLAWS OF THE GENRE flag at the top. Except that I believe that a book can carry the flaws of the genre and still be a worthwhile read, and I resent that YA gets more than it's fair share of slagging, and I'm not particularly interested in contributing to that.
So yeah, I agree that there are prominent weaknesses within the book, but I think that's more of a genre problem than a this-book problem. And while I'd love to see the main body of YA rise above these problems (as some YA titles do), I accept that a variant of Sturgeon's Law applies: 90% of any genre is going to carry the hallmarks of the genre, good and bad.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-06-23 04:53 pm (UTC)I dunno, maybe I should put a THIS IS VERY YA-LIKE YA, AND CARRIES MANY OF THE COMMON FLAWS OF THE GENRE flag at the top. Except that I believe that a book can carry the flaws of the genre and still be a worthwhile read, and I resent that YA gets more than it's fair share of slagging, and I'm not particularly interested in contributing to that.
So yeah, I agree that there are prominent weaknesses within the book, but I think that's more of a genre problem than a this-book problem. And while I'd love to see the main body of YA rise above these problems (as some YA titles do), I accept that a variant of Sturgeon's Law applies: 90% of any genre is going to carry the hallmarks of the genre, good and bad.