book review: the right frame
Mar. 7th, 2013 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Diviners by Libba Bray is the first of a YA trilogy (well, the series length isn't specified yet, but I'm just guessing here) set in 1926, which for the first three-quarters of the book I wanted to like more than I actually did. The Jazz Age setting, the slang, the historical tidbits, there was so much that sounded good, and yet the pacing seemed draggy and awkwardly rushed in turns, the ominous foreshadowy bits were way too repetitive, and it was suffering from a major case of "everyone else in the large cast is more interesting than the annoying main character" syndrome (aka the "Jack on Lost" problem).
And then I had - I don't know, an insight. An inspiration. I had been reading this book like I wanted it to be White Cat, emotionally tense, tightly written. But what this book really is is Sandman. With the cast, and the slowly-developing different ways they connect, and the historical color, and bits of songs, and those long repetitive descriptive bits are *repeated evocative images*, and the creepy bits are much creepier if you picture them as panels, and - I don't know if this will make sense to anyone but me. The easier prescription would just be to cut a hundred-plus pages out of the damn thing. But it was *so much better* once I started translating it in my head into Sandman. (I would say "a graphic novel", but I've read lots of graphic novels, and really I specifically mean the look and pacing of Sandman.)
And then I had - I don't know, an insight. An inspiration. I had been reading this book like I wanted it to be White Cat, emotionally tense, tightly written. But what this book really is is Sandman. With the cast, and the slowly-developing different ways they connect, and the historical color, and bits of songs, and those long repetitive descriptive bits are *repeated evocative images*, and the creepy bits are much creepier if you picture them as panels, and - I don't know if this will make sense to anyone but me. The easier prescription would just be to cut a hundred-plus pages out of the damn thing. But it was *so much better* once I started translating it in my head into Sandman. (I would say "a graphic novel", but I've read lots of graphic novels, and really I specifically mean the look and pacing of Sandman.)
