Category: Uncategorized

What I Hate About YA

Obviously I love the Young Adult genre.  I wouldn’t be reading it and focusing my blog around it if I didn’t.  But YA as a genre has its flaws and there are some things that consistently appear in books that drive me mad.  What are some of these things?  Read on!

Relationships

1.  The girl always gets the guy (or vice versa).

I won’t claim I’m an expert in matters of the heart, but I do know one thing: You don’t always get the person you want.  Seriously, why is love in YA books always requited?  It doesn’t happen like that in real life.  In real life, when you have a crush on someone, there’s a good chance they don’t feel the same way.  And it sucks.  Yes, fiction is supposed to be uplifting to a certain extent, but can’t it be a little more realistic? Continue reading →

What Book Reviewers do in Their Free Time

Carrie Pictures 2012 287What I am holding in this picture is a latch hook.  The basic idea is that you have a ‘mat’ that’s a grid.  On nearly every little square, you tie yarn on to make a pattern.  No, you don’t have to create a pattern yourself (thank goodness).  When you buy a latch hook, you’re supplied with the pre-cut yarn and a pattern to work off of, so it’s not that difficult.

Now, ‘not that difficult’ doesn’t mean that doing this was easy or quick.  There are 91 columns and 131 rows, meaning that in order to complete this, I stitched in 11, 921 individual pieces of yarn over a period of less than two months.  Yes, this is an incredibly big latch hook as you can tell by the size comparison in the picture.  No one could accuse me of being tall, but that is one big latch hook.

This has absolutely nothing to do with books or book reviewing, but we book reviewers are people who have different hobbies besides reading.  Mine just happens to be doing latch hooks.

How to Alienate Book Reviewers

Hello!

I was wondering if you would like to review my book, Random Name.  The blurb is below.

[Big long blurb I’m too lazy to read.]

Have a nice day,

Random Author Person

I get these all of the time.  They’re form emails and they can turn a great day into a bad one because my blood starts to boil after reading only a few lines.  And it’s about time I’ve tackled them on my blog because they are rampant in the book blogging community.  Here are my thoughts on them:

Names

Names are easy to find, believe me.

Argument: “Names are hard to find!”

Us bloggers (or maybe it’s just me) are kind of vain.  Even if we don’t have our full names on our blogs, we usually have either our first names or pseudonyms on an ‘About’ page.  This is usually located in an easy-to-find tab next to the Home tab.  By not even bothering to use a blogger’s name in the greeting, authors are sending the message that we’re not worth their time.

Do you see the hypocrisy here?  Authors are expecting book bloggers to take hours out of their days to read their books but can’t even be bothered to spend a minute maximum finding the blogger’s name.  That’s not lazy, that’s rude. Continue reading →

What Makes a Good Dystopia?

I know, I know.  ‘Good dystopia’ is an oxymoron, but I think you know what I mean.  Dystopias, ever since the release of The Hunger Games, have exploded in popularity both in the teen and adult markets.  There are a lot of good ones out there, but there are a lot of bad ones too.  But what makes a dystopia good (read: interesting) for the reader?

Believability

1.  It has to be believable.

Many of you know my gripe about how the faction system in the Divergent trilogy would never, ever work because people are not like that.  If dystopian fiction doesn’t have a dystopia that makes sense or could really happen someday, readers are not going to like it.  Authors have to know enough about human nature and world politics in order to create dystopias that could really happen.  Sadly, a lot of authors just seem to skip this general knowledge requirement and jump in head first.

Why was Orwell’s 1984 so popular?  Because it really could happen.  It drew elements from the society of the day and predicted some things that are going on to this day.  Compare that to Divergent, where there are 5 factions that you pretty much have to join and fit completely into one category unless you’re Divergent.  Most people in Veronica Roth’s world are not Divergent, which tells you how much she really knows about human nature. Continue reading →