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books by people I know
Dec. 15th, 2013 11:11 pmThis thing where I review every book I read suddenly becomes a little scarier when I'm reading something by someone I know personally, like, ack, what if I didn't like it, would I say so? Fortunately that's not a problem at this time!
Freaks by Julie Love is a middle-grade "real world + powers" novel, which - oh, look, I left my first-ever Amazon review, I'm just going to paste it in: "The Girl With The Silver Eyes" was one of my favorite books when I was in elementary school, and this hits the same sweet spot. I love superhero origin stories, and I love realistic, appealing kids navigating the social world, so kids with clever, inventive powers, discovering themselves and becoming friends and working as a team - magic! My only criticism is that I'd really like to see a "Freakquel" and I don't see any mention of one. I would recommend this to people who liked R.J. Palacio's "Wonder" or Rebecca Stead's "When You Reach Me" or the aforementioned "Girl With The Silver Eyes". To add a little more, one thing I particularly liked was ( spoiler )
I think I only know one contributer to the anthology Puzzle Box in person, but I'm pretty sure I know of a couple more of them in online fandom circles. I had actually meant to buy The Ships We Sail, but there was a technical snafu, which I fully intend to finish sorting out (they were extremely prompt about replying about it, I was just like, hrm, now that I have Puzzle Box right here on my phone already I can not actually resist *reading* it now), so, Puzzle Box. About which I have thoughts. Namely, I know that conventional wisdom is that Original Writing is the arete of writing and fanfiction is just sort of training wheels or masturbation or whatever. But dude, my already-high appreciation of this excellent anthology only multiplied when I realized that more than one of the stories was a serial-number file-off, because a) a story that was pretty good was now really interesting as commentary on source, a story that I wasn't so into was now interesting at all in that light, and b) the whole anthology became a sort of delicious game, like, which other of these stories might be file-offs? Could the *whole anthology be*? Is that the puzzle of this Puzzle Box? I maaaaay actually have clapped my hands in glee. Fortunately the toddler probably figured I was talking to him. Very spoilery thoughts on individual stories and guesses about fandoms under a spoiler cut.
( the puzzle of Puzzle Box )
Freaks by Julie Love is a middle-grade "real world + powers" novel, which - oh, look, I left my first-ever Amazon review, I'm just going to paste it in: "The Girl With The Silver Eyes" was one of my favorite books when I was in elementary school, and this hits the same sweet spot. I love superhero origin stories, and I love realistic, appealing kids navigating the social world, so kids with clever, inventive powers, discovering themselves and becoming friends and working as a team - magic! My only criticism is that I'd really like to see a "Freakquel" and I don't see any mention of one. I would recommend this to people who liked R.J. Palacio's "Wonder" or Rebecca Stead's "When You Reach Me" or the aforementioned "Girl With The Silver Eyes". To add a little more, one thing I particularly liked was ( spoiler )
I think I only know one contributer to the anthology Puzzle Box in person, but I'm pretty sure I know of a couple more of them in online fandom circles. I had actually meant to buy The Ships We Sail, but there was a technical snafu, which I fully intend to finish sorting out (they were extremely prompt about replying about it, I was just like, hrm, now that I have Puzzle Box right here on my phone already I can not actually resist *reading* it now), so, Puzzle Box. About which I have thoughts. Namely, I know that conventional wisdom is that Original Writing is the arete of writing and fanfiction is just sort of training wheels or masturbation or whatever. But dude, my already-high appreciation of this excellent anthology only multiplied when I realized that more than one of the stories was a serial-number file-off, because a) a story that was pretty good was now really interesting as commentary on source, a story that I wasn't so into was now interesting at all in that light, and b) the whole anthology became a sort of delicious game, like, which other of these stories might be file-offs? Could the *whole anthology be*? Is that the puzzle of this Puzzle Box? I maaaaay actually have clapped my hands in glee. Fortunately the toddler probably figured I was talking to him. Very spoilery thoughts on individual stories and guesses about fandoms under a spoiler cut.
( the puzzle of Puzzle Box )
