Cemetery Boys
Mar. 10th, 2021 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraCemetery Boys, Aiden Thomas. This was awesome! YA about a trans witch boy who summons a dead boy and then can't get rid of him. Excellent pacing and really nice construction - without getting too spoilery about it, this is the story of two people trapped in transitional states who are able to help each other out of them. (Spoilers: PLUS KISSING.) This is exactly why I can't quit YA. Strong visuals and a nice tight timeline - it would make a terrific movie, and I would love to sit in a theater (or, you know, in front of Netflix) and have these feelings again for two hours. I have immediately added it to my Lodestar noms and would recommend it to anyone willing to read dude-centric YA who likes YA.
ETA: I forgot to talk about the Spanish! So, there was occasional dialogue in Spanish in this, for flavor I guess, or to make the point that they were sometimes speaking Spanish, or because English wouldn't have exactly the same weight, some of which got directly translated and some of which didn't. I always thought it was entirely clear from context what was going on, but I could also more or less read the Spanish*; I remember being really frustrated by untranslated French in books when I was younger (I don't remember what I was reading, as a teen, that just assumed everyone read a little French, but I recall it coming up more than once and I hated it), so I really can't say how it would read to someone else. The reason I actually wanted to mention it though was that I was thinking about what you would do with the Spanish if you wanted to translate this book *into* Spanish, and what I decided was that just as the Spanish mostly shows up in dialogue between certain people, what you would do is keep some English in the conversations between certain *other* people, to indicate in the other direction that those conversations were in English. Sort of fun to think about which words would get the "this is a word of cultural significance that we don't translate" treatment. (I am not *nearly* fluent enough to actually do this work, just to think about it, to be clear.)
*Funny story about my semiliteracy: I recently tried reading a couple of the Strange Horizons stories in Spanish, in their annual bilingual issue, and was just like, fuck, I understand many of these words but what the fuck is going on here. But then I tried reading them in English and was like okay I understand all of these words but what the fuck is going on here, so I guess my Spanish reading experience was not as far off as I thought. (Also one of them seemed like a less direct translation, like there was some stuff that was just left out of the English, which may have been part of the point but I'm *really* not fluent enough to get if something clever was happening with that, alas.)
ETA: I forgot to talk about the Spanish! So, there was occasional dialogue in Spanish in this, for flavor I guess, or to make the point that they were sometimes speaking Spanish, or because English wouldn't have exactly the same weight, some of which got directly translated and some of which didn't. I always thought it was entirely clear from context what was going on, but I could also more or less read the Spanish*; I remember being really frustrated by untranslated French in books when I was younger (I don't remember what I was reading, as a teen, that just assumed everyone read a little French, but I recall it coming up more than once and I hated it), so I really can't say how it would read to someone else. The reason I actually wanted to mention it though was that I was thinking about what you would do with the Spanish if you wanted to translate this book *into* Spanish, and what I decided was that just as the Spanish mostly shows up in dialogue between certain people, what you would do is keep some English in the conversations between certain *other* people, to indicate in the other direction that those conversations were in English. Sort of fun to think about which words would get the "this is a word of cultural significance that we don't translate" treatment. (I am not *nearly* fluent enough to actually do this work, just to think about it, to be clear.)
*Funny story about my semiliteracy: I recently tried reading a couple of the Strange Horizons stories in Spanish, in their annual bilingual issue, and was just like, fuck, I understand many of these words but what the fuck is going on here. But then I tried reading them in English and was like okay I understand all of these words but what the fuck is going on here, so I guess my Spanish reading experience was not as far off as I thought. (Also one of them seemed like a less direct translation, like there was some stuff that was just left out of the English, which may have been part of the point but I'm *really* not fluent enough to get if something clever was happening with that, alas.)
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