book reviews: Paper Towns and The Mirage
Apr. 24th, 2012 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocoptera(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...)
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Date: 2012-04-24 05:36 pm (UTC)I recently (like a week ago) discovered that John Green the author is the same guy as John Green the youtube guy, half of Vlog Brothers and cocreator of the YT Crash Course series. I've never read any of his books, but my friend who reviews YA (http://www.parenthetical.net/) has spoken highly of his books. Given all that, I suspect I'll read them sometime, although non-genre YA is not my go-to category.