Critical Thinking: Reviews

Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson

The story review on Amazon read:

Since the beginning of the school year, high school freshman Melinda has found that it's been getting harder and harder for her to speak out loud: "My throat is always sore, my lips raw.... Every time I try to talk to my parents or a teacher, I sputter or freeze.... It's like I have some kind of spastic laryngitis." What could have caused Melinda to suddenly fall mute? Could it be due to the fact that no one at school is speaking to her because she called the cops and got everyone busted at the seniors' big end-of-summer party? Or maybe it's because her parents' only form of communication is Post-It notes written on their way out the door to their nine-to-whenever jobs. While Melinda is bothered by these things, deep down she knows the real reason why she's been struck mute...

It sounded interesting, so I asked for it.

The hook on the back page read a little differently—definitely gave away more of the plot—and made the story seem a little less surreal than I’d been looking forward to.

I started it on Saturday morning, as soon as there was light enough to read while Maj Tom drove to Copper Mountain and The Boy chattered endlessly in the back seat about his day of skiing. I finished it around 1:30 that afternoon, sitting on the patio outside the resort’s restaurant, The Boy’s Babysitter (she who hated Twilight) engrossed in Wicked across from me.

A quarter of the way through, I’d already resolved to give it to the Babysitter. Three-quarters of the way through, she said she’d already read it two years ago and thought it depressing. All the way through, I sat back, satisfied that there is something good and right in the publishing industry. And grateful that the Babysitter is confident and secure in her own life enough to not relate to the book too much.

I loved the way the book was so completely inside the character. It’s first-person, present-tense, and the immediacy is intense, but not overwhelming. The MC is neither the squealy-ear-drum-piercing nor the dramatic-world-is-ending variety of teenage girl. She’s a normal kid who has almost completely curled in on herself. Her slide is organic and natural. Unplanned, but almost inevitable.

I’d been getting discouraged lately. A (incredibly-small, brand-new, actually-know-her) publisher’s reader went through a couple chapters of my Best Beloved WIP and wanted me to cut the first six pages—six lousy pages of character introduction and building emotional tension—and get right to the explosion. The influences around the specific genre in which I find myself writing seem to value fast-paced adventure stories with just enough character development to allow the reader to relate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just tend to find greater drama in a balance between dramatic explosions and the characters’ reactions to them. Not mushy emotional stuff, but more than “they went there and did some stuff and went there and fought a bad guy…” Speak left me feeling encouraged that maybe there’s still room for thoughtful writing.

The Good Fairies of New York
Martin Millar

If the plot of Speak meandered organically, the plot of Good Fairies charges forth like a flight of drunken, horny pixies. Scottish fairies Morag and Heather, who believe the Ramones are every bit as important as Scottish folk music, accidentally enrage the fairies of the clan MacLeod by cutting up their magical banner, and escape to New York where they discover an alarming number of dead street people. Tulip and Petal are fleeing their father, the evil fairie King Tala of Cornwall, while he and his twelve barons enslave the people of his kingdom in sweatshops. Kerry, suffering horribly from Crohn's Disease, is desperately seeking the materials for her Scottish flower alphabet art installation, which she hopes will beat her ex-boyfriend's production of A Midsummer's Night Dream because he promised to teach her Johnny Thunders' New York Dolls guitar solos, then dumped her. Dinnie, across the street from Kerry, just wants to sit in his squatter's apartment, eating canned corned beef and drinking beer, and watching...ahem...questionable commercials. Aelric is trying to rebel against the evil Cornish king and his industrial revolution, despite his attraction to the king's step-daughter. And Magenta, AKA Xenophon, scrambles across Manhattan, evading and sortying against Tissaphernes who either wants to destroy her Hoplite army or just recover his recipe for the hallucinogenic Fitzroy cocktail.

All in a book with scenes half the length of Neil Gaiman's introduction.

The writing could have used a good editing. A few typos, some unattributed dialog, a couple of out-of-sequence scenes, and an obviously British author.

But who stinkin' cares?! Plot-wise? Holy cats! Very tight; all wound up in the end. Meandering and confusing, but worth it. BTW: not for kids.

What have you been reading lately? What have you read that you liked? What would you recommend to these fine Hobbitses (and hirsute Elves)?

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Kersley Fitzgerald is a wanna-be writer who's had Don't Speak stuck in her head since Saturday and the Ramone's I Wanna Be Sedated since Monday. (Wonder why.) And the delusion that she has Gwen Stefani's abs for the last 15 years.