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book reviews: Paper Towns and The Mirage
Apr. 24th, 2012 12:26 pm(Nice pair of titles there, complete coincidence...)
Paper Towns - non-genre YA. John Green is the non-David Levithan half of Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Paper Towns is a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and is probably *most* interesting as part of a literary conversation about that trope (I wonder whether anyone's written anything specifically responding to it yet; it came out in 2008, so quite possibly). But it also has some good scenes and lovely extended metaphors and one passage that made me laugh out loud, so I enjoyed it aside from that, although I did not find it so profound as actual Y. A.s might. Green's most recent book, The Fault In Our Stars, keeps getting mentioned, and on the basis of Paper Towns I am now more inclined to read it rather than less, so there's that.
The Mirage is Matt Ruff's latest. I read everything he writes, which isn't too hard because he goes about five years between books. I liked The Mirage much better than the last one, Bad Monkeys, although not as well as the one before that, Set This House In Order, which I've re-read a bunch. The Mirage is alternate history dealing with 9/11 and is probably best if you don't know much about it going in - like, the jacket copy says too much, in my opinion. So I'm going to avoid saying anything more about the premise. I think the danger of alternate history worldbuilding can be that it's more fun to come up with than to read - there are places here where Ruff is obviously having a lot of fun being clever, but it never quite got to the point where I was impatient with it rather than amused. And in the end there was enough story there to feel like a story and not just a world. Sort of the opposite of YA, in that I think a lot of it would be lost on someone who wasn't reading the news back in the 00s, but recommended to those who were. (I'd be happy to discuss-with-spoilers if anyone else has read it and has thoughts...)
Paper Towns - non-genre YA. John Green is the non-David Levithan half of Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Paper Towns is a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and is probably *most* interesting as part of a literary conversation about that trope (I wonder whether anyone's written anything specifically responding to it yet; it came out in 2008, so quite possibly). But it also has some good scenes and lovely extended metaphors and one passage that made me laugh out loud, so I enjoyed it aside from that, although I did not find it so profound as actual Y. A.s might. Green's most recent book, The Fault In Our Stars, keeps getting mentioned, and on the basis of Paper Towns I am now more inclined to read it rather than less, so there's that.
The Mirage is Matt Ruff's latest. I read everything he writes, which isn't too hard because he goes about five years between books. I liked The Mirage much better than the last one, Bad Monkeys, although not as well as the one before that, Set This House In Order, which I've re-read a bunch. The Mirage is alternate history dealing with 9/11 and is probably best if you don't know much about it going in - like, the jacket copy says too much, in my opinion. So I'm going to avoid saying anything more about the premise. I think the danger of alternate history worldbuilding can be that it's more fun to come up with than to read - there are places here where Ruff is obviously having a lot of fun being clever, but it never quite got to the point where I was impatient with it rather than amused. And in the end there was enough story there to feel like a story and not just a world. Sort of the opposite of YA, in that I think a lot of it would be lost on someone who wasn't reading the news back in the 00s, but recommended to those who were. (I'd be happy to discuss-with-spoilers if anyone else has read it and has thoughts...)
