I love the Harry Potter books, but I also agree with Sady Doyle’s feminist criticisms of them. Ms Doyle discusses the REAL hero(ine) of the books in her article, In Praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger Series, and follows this up with The Further Adventures of Hermione Granger. Both articles are well worth a read, if you’re interested in either Harry Potter or the way girls are portrayed in popular culture.
(Thanks to Read Plus for the link.)
I’m officially on holiday this fortnight, and I think I’ve lost the ability to construct proper paragraphs. However, here are some things I noticed, but was too busy to post about, during the past month or so:
Kate Beaton put up some new Julius Caesar comics on her website. Here’s Part One. Part Two involves Cassius glaring actual daggers at Caesar, and the introduction of the truly awesome Dogs of War (even if one of them looks more like a Bunny-Rabbit of War).
Montmaray has also popped up on NationStates. It used to be The Kingdom of Montmaray, but is currently The Incorporated States of Montmaray and is ruled over by a “corrupt dictatorship”. Its “national animal is the Blue Heeler, which frolics freely in the nation’s many lush forests” and “an increasing percentage of the population’s youth have homosexual parents”. (I had nothing to do with this, I swear.)
Two authors, Katie Crouch and Grady Hendrix, have also published an article about their experiences writing YA fiction. Apparently, writing for teenagers means throwing aside all the rules for good writing, because:
“. . . readers in Y.A. don’t care about rumination. They don’t want you to pore over your sentences trying to find the perfect turn of phrase . . . In Y.A. you write two or three drafts of a chapter, not eight.”
Oh, really? But the funniest bit was:
“The average length of time you get to write a Y.A. book is six months. Compared with ‘literary’ fiction, that’s warp speed.”
SIX MONTHS? I spent longer than that just doing the research for my last book. Gosh, I wish someone had told me earlier that I didn’t need to put any thought or care into my YA novels. Think of all the time and energy I would have saved myself. Also, apparently ‘YA fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’ are mutually exclusive categories. Has anyone told M. T. Anderson, Margo Lanagan or Sonya Hartnett this?
I’ll be back soon (as soon as I’ve remembered how to write in paragraphs) to post a rant and a rave about some books I’ve recently read. In the meantime, don’t forget my book give-away is still on.
If I were a Sensible YA Author, I’d stay well away from Goodreads reviews of my books. After all, reviews aren’t for authors; they’re for readers. Of course, I’m not a Sensible YA Author (if I was, I’d be writing about zombie mermaids, not 1930s politics), so I do occasionally visit Goodreads, where I get to read one-star reviews like this [warnings for plot spoilers and homophobia]:
“The story was interesting and engaging until the end when the author suggests the boys are lovers. WHY? For a young adult book–or any for that matter? Too bad Ms Cooper ruined the book.”
That was the entire review – and that’s a very polite, positive and coherent review, compared to some of them.
But then, there are also Goodreads reviews that are critical, yet thoughtful and entertaining, such as this one of A Brief History of Montmaray, which begins:
“Michelle Cooper is the Quentin Tarantino of young adult novels.”
Um . . . what? It turns out the reviewer isn’t referring to the gory murders in the book, but to Tarantino’s habit of wearing his influences on his sleeve. The review consists largely of complaints about the characters and the plot, but it’s smart and passionate and, most importantly, uses LOLcats to illustrate its points. I loved it.
Then the same reviewer tackles The FitzOsbornes in Exile:
“Dear sir or friend,
I am a princess in exile. My family cannot access our funds unless you, a kind American, will launder money through your bank account and send letterhead, bank statements and personal documents. Thank you for helping.Sincerely,
the FitzOsbournesI don’t know why they didn’t just send out a letter like this, if they needed money so bad . . .”
The review goes on to compare the plot of The FitzOsbornes in Exile to that of the recent X-Men film, and regards Simon as the Clark Gable of Montmaray. It’s absolutely hilarious. Thank you, Mariel, you made my day. Well, my morning, at least. Or part of my morning.
Now, to slightly more serious matters. Here is my blog’s Spam of the Month:
“Dude, you should be a writer. Your article is really interesting. You should do it for a living.”
Okay then, I will! Unfortunately, I’m finding ‘writing for a living’ a bit busy at the moment, so my poor blog has been neglected this month. However, in a few weeks, I will (hopefully) have handed over the manuscript of Montmaray Three (currently known as The NeverEnding Story) to my long-suffering and infinitely patient editor. Then I’ll return to my irregular – but slightly more frequent – blog posting.
In the meantime, just talk quietly amongst yourselves.
The British Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has announced that school children should be reading fifty books a year. Leaving aside the irony of this coming from a politician whose government is slashing funding to libraries, the proposal raises a number of questions. Does forcing reluctant or poor readers to read a book each week really make them more enthusiastic about reading? What does Mr Gove mean by ‘book’? I’m guessing (and I could be wrong) that he isn’t counting graphic novels, comics or picture books towards the total. And why fifty books, and not thirty, or a hundred? Is quantity more important than quality? Do they have to be fifty different books? If so, does that mean a child who chooses to read and re-read a beloved book isn’t getting any benefit from the experience? And how many books has Mr Gove read this year?
Of course, as a reader and a writer, I’d love more children to be exposed to the wonderful world of books. However, this proposal seems designed to suck all the joy out of reading by reducing it to quotas and ‘learning experiences’. If reading some arbitrary number of books is essential for a well-balanced life, then all adults should be doing it, too. I decided to examine my reading from the first twelve weeks of this year and determine what I’d learned from the experience.
Total Books Read: Sixteen. This doesn’t include the two books I started, and didn’t finish. One of those was a book I’d read before and decided to re-read to find out if it was really as bad as I’d thought (it was). The other was a contemporary YA romance that I hated so much, I had to stop reading about a third of the way through. I made two further attempts at it, then decided life was too short to waste any more of my time on it.
Number of Novels Read: Ten.
Number of ‘Memoirs’ Read: Three. (I’ve included in this category any book written by someone about their own life, even though one of the books probably wouldn’t be labelled a ‘memoir’.)
Number of Other Non-Fiction Books Read: Two.
Number of Anthologies Read: One.
Number of Books Read That I’d Previously Read: Five. (For various reasons, I didn’t feel up to tackling any new books during the first few weeks of the year, so I re-read some old favourites.)
Number of Books Written By People Who Are Dead (But Were Alive When They Wrote Their Books): Four.
Number of Books Written By Australian Authors: Five.
Number of Books Written By British Authors: Nine, if I include the editor of the anthology. (What? I’m writing a book set in England, okay?)
Number of Books Written By American Authors: One. (I revere you, Susan Faludi.)
Number of Books Translated from Swedish: One.
Number of e-Books: One. It was a free download because it was out of copyright, and I read it on my computer, because I don’t own any e-readers. I’d rather have read it as a paper book, but then I’d have had to pay serious money for it because it’s out of print in Australia – and frankly, it wasn’t that good.
Five Things I’ve Learned As A Result of Reading Approximately 1.3 Books Per Week This Year:
1. Vampire novels don’t have to be sparkly and anti-feminist. Sometimes, they can be scathing critiques of modern Scandinavian society that manage to combine extreme horror with a poignant portrayal of friendship between outsiders (Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindquist, for which I have not included a link because I couldn’t find one without plot spoilers).
2. I really like novels that combine information about an unfamiliar aspect of history with clever plotting and endearing, plausible characters (Small Island by Andrea Levy).
3. Novels about Victorian clergymen don’t have to be dull and worthy. Sometimes they can be witty, hilarious and unputdownable (Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope).
4. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas isn’t anywhere near as groundbreaking or perceptive as the hype suggests, and its publishers should have spent some of its advertising budget on more thorough copy-editing and proofreading. It was okay, though, and at least now, I can say I’ve finally read it.
5. I should read more anthologies, because they’re a good way to sample a range of writers. Also, I should now read everything Patrick Ness has ever written, because Different for Boys is the best short story I’ve read in years. Four vibrant teenage characters, a school that feels completely real, great dialogue, droll jokes, a boy with a crush on an Irish golfer, frantic sex, a devastating fight, a heartbreaking kiss and some snarky references to YA book censorship, all in only forty-four pages (in the YA anthology, Losing It, edited by Keith Gray. The other stories in this collection were fine, by the way, but they just didn’t hit me the way Different for Boys did.)
One Other Thing: If politicians want children to read more, they should provide adequate funding for libraries, teachers and learning disability support in schools, and remove taxes on sales of books.
One Further Thing: The Montmaray give-away is still on, till the 5th of April. If you win a book, you could count it towards your fifty books for the year.
That is all.
The people who design my book covers have consistently come up with thoughtful, attractive designs, but I think this one is the most gorgeous yet:
It’s so glamorous! It’s such a great depiction of the mood of the book! And isn’t that model the perfect Sophie? She’s doing the Queen Matilda chin tilt! And her facial expression! Is she sad, or bored, or calm, or curious, or defiant, or all of those things at once? She’s even wearing the pearl drop earrings Aunt Charlotte gives her for her seventeenth birthday. At first, I thought the dress looked more 1950s than 1930s, but it’s an actual photo from a 1930s edition of Vogue. (The dress is probably more daring and fashionable than Sophie would wear, though – and she must have just had her hair done by Monsieur Raymond, the hair artiste.)
Sitting next to Sophie is Toby. It can’t be Simon, because the figure has fair hair, and it can’t be Rupert, because he seems to be smoking a cigarette. In the background is Veronica, dressed in mourning and dancing with . . . someone. He’s probably not Daniel, not at a Society ball. I guess it could be Simon – in which case, they’re stomping on each other’s feet, out of range of the camera.
I love the colours of this cover, too. I don’t know if the designer planned it, but it brings to my mind the red, white and black of the Nazi flag – a chilling hint of what’s in store for these characters.
Then there’s the beautiful title, written in a lovely 1930s Art Deco font.
Oh, it’s all so very pretty . . . and if you live in the United States or Canada, you can buy your very own copy in two months time! (Actually, I guess you could buy a copy wherever you live in the world, as long as you don’t mind paying a large postage bill.)
I should also mention that the paperback edition of A Brief History of Montmaray is out next month in North America. The cover looks like this:
It’s quite different from the North American hardcover, which featured a photo of a castle perched on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. That hardcover design seemed to polarise readers – some thought it was really striking and interesting, others felt it made the book look boring. Which just goes to show you can’t please everyone. This paperback cover does look a bit more ‘fairy-tale princess’, which could be a good or bad thing. I mean, FitzOsborne princesses don’t tend to hang around on tower balconies waiting for a prince to rescue them, but on the other hand, it is a very nice photo of a castle on a moonlit night. (And is that a full moon, hidden by clouds? Watch out for werechickens!)
North American readers can buy this paperback next month – or they can buy the lovely hardcover edition right now. Or they can buy both!
