On the Edge of Seventeen (shout out to Stevie Nicks)

 I have been reading a lot of YA books while I am over here in Thailand, partly as a way to get to know my niece Selma (she is an avid reader), and partly because I actually quite enjoy reading the genre.

Thus I entered the world of Cassandra Clare, where everyone is perpetually 17 and old people are hashtag gross. In her Mortal Instruments series the characters act and speak like mature adults. 

For example:

"I feel like you can look inside me and see all the places I am odd or unusual and fit your heart around them, for you are odd and unusual in just the same way. We are the same.”

in teen would be......

Like.. um you be kinda wonky and sus but that be otay, we be samesies.

and

"It's all right to love someone who doesn't love you back, as long as they're worth you loving them. As long as they deserve it."

4rl it be aight to simp in the friend zone, if they Gucci.

The head of the Shadowhunter Institute is a 24 year old women married to a man whom I suppose is the same age but acts like a 60 year old - think of the actor James Fleet who always plays the bumbling stuttering slightly posh wit nitwit (I loathe him as an actor). Spoiler alert she is succeeded as head of the Institute by the 17 year old Will by the end of the series.  (By the way Shadowhunters are immortal yet there does not seem to be all that many of them. The institute has literally hundreds of beds for visiting Shadowhunters yet only 9 people, all below the age of 24, occupy it??!!!).

In fact it got to the point where I simply imagined the characters as much older than they are just to be able to keep reading. Of course there is still a fair smattering of teenage angst and annoying impetuousness. And tons of canoodling and ......SEX.

Now I read a lot of books as a teenager including books in the YA genre and there was nary a kiss let alone full on rumpy-pumpy.

Nowadays they go at it like rabbits..... after pages and pages of fluttering hearts, longing gazes and "will they, won't they." They are also very tall; the girls are pretty, but the boys are beautiful; all corded muscle and testosterone.

Whilst conceding that these books are pure fantasy and very nearly the equivalent of Mills & Boon for teenagers, I wonder whether they set up an expectation for children that they will always be able to act wilfully and get their own way, and naturally will succeed at everything they do, seemingly with little graft, but rather because of their innate natural abilities. Spoiler alert- most of us are JUST not that naturally gifted!!!! To be fair, they do train a lot with swords and morning stars etc but us mere mortals also train (at sports etc) and remain stonkingly average.

I do applaud the fact that these books embrace diversity with LGBTI and non-Caucasian characters. I am not even censorious of the sex. What these books do have is copious amounts of extreme violence.  They also encourage revenge narratives, in which death is the metered out justice.  This is symptomatic of a larger problem in entertainment, where casual violence is often cartoonish and inserted for cheap laughs.

These are not bad books per se.  They are highly appealing to the young reader and a great way to get kids interested in at least picking up a book.  The real dividend however is for readers to realise in the end the inherent limitations of the genre, and to move onto more challenging reading material.  For example Cassandra Clare very cleverly salts her books with copious references to classics in literature like Jane Eyre and direct quotes from great poets of the romantic age like Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Keats.  

I remain hopeful that Selma will read Jane Eyre. Unfortunately Selma gave Pride and Prejudice a bad book rating but I am confident she will like Jane Eyre better.

That's it for now. Until next time.  Toodle-pip or as the teenies say bubi!

POST SCRIPT

Selma says that the Shadow hunters are not immortal. Apparently they actually die early from fighting and stuff. They just have AWESOME powers. My bad.

Welcome to my Bad Book Blog (B to the 3)

 Welcome to my Bad Book Blog, inspired by the putrid novels I have had the displeasure of reading recently, interspersed at times with random opinions on other stuff.  

It is in the nature of things that bad books are memorable, albeit for all the wrong reasons.  Poor characterisation, unbelievable story lines, temporal inconsistencies, poor language and plain old bad grammar.

But lest you think I am just a curmudgeon unable to offer words of praise to any literary work, let me mention just a few outstanding writings of fiction that I have read in the last two years- Piranesi by Susannah Clarke, both of Stuart Turton's novels, the Jade War series by Fonda Lee and Garry Disher's trilogy featuring Constable Paul Hirschausen.  Claire North (but not her other works under different nom de plume) and Laura Purcell have also been relatively recent but nevertheless pleasurable discoveries.

On this blog, bad books will receive a rating out of 5, with 5 representing the nadir of literary effort.  Instead of stars, books will receive the coveted turtle neck designation thanks to the Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown.  The Da Vinci Code occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of the GLG Anderson children.  John, Catherine and I all managed to read it on one memorable train trip through Europe. The journey was intermittently punctuated by the sharing of particularly choice passages involving Professor Robert Langdon and his Harris Tweed and Burberry Charcoal Turtlenecks. I know I know, some people absolutely love the Da Vinci Code. Well too bad, I don't give a toss what they think.  As Stephen Fry said about the book:

"It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind". Amen to that! 

So let us begin.  The first entry in my Bad Book Blog will be dedicated to Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and boy oh boy what a stinker it is. 

The story is basically about this journalist bint and millennial who is chosen out of the blue to document the life story of a Bette Davis/Marilyn Monroe like movie star, apparently because said journalist is a "brilliant young talent"- cue rolling on the floor laughing.  The binty journalist, in breach of her contract with her employee, keeps this information secret, on the basis that she thinks that she will make her fame and fortune out of the sales of the biography. Little does she know that as an employee she has no entitlement to the copyright in the said work as it is ostensibly being written in the course of her employment. At best she can claim the moral right to attribution.  Stupid millennial.  Anyway, apart from hashtag look at me I'm pretending to be a brilliant writer, the other appallingly awful character is Evelyn Hugo herself.  Ms Hugo is hispanic with dark eyebrows, bottle blond hair and big bazongas. She figures she is going to break out of poverty and become a famous movie star, because no one can resist her "allure".  So far, so -so. Where the brown stuff hit the whirly thing for me is that her breakthrough role is as Jo March, yes you heard me, in a movie version of Little Women by Louisa M Alcott.  Now not in my wildest imaging would I have ever pictured tomboyish Jo March as a blonde Marilyn look-a-like. What was Jenkins Reid thinking!!!!!  I confess I gave up reading the book at this point even though I think she was only on to husband number two.  

Here are some of Ms Jenkins Reid's literary stylings in the voice of Evelyn Hugo:

“But if you have to go, then go. Go if it hurts. Go if it’s time. Just go knowing you were loved, that I will never forget you. Paging Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins...

AND

“Heartbreak is a loss. Divorce is a piece of paper.” And may de Force be with you...

AND

“Guilt is a feeling I’ve never made much peace with. I find that when it rears its head, it brings an army.When I feel guilty for one thing, I start to see all the other things I should feel guilty for.” Yeah how about guilt for even thinking that you could play Jo March...sheesh

To conclude my first Bad Book Blog Entry The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo earns a solid 4 turtlenecks for consistently being turgid, unbelievable, and so up its own fundament it needs a periscope to see.

POSTSCRIPT

If you think that The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo may be just an aberration and that Taylor Jenkins Reid has a good novel in her, think again.  Daisy Jones and the Six is not much better. Its a story about a bunch of hippy, dippy musicians who try to make it big in the music industry. It tries so hard to be "deep" but just comes across as asinine.

Here are some of the things that Daisy says:

“You think that tragedy means that the world is over but you realize the world is never over. It's just never over. Nothing will end it".........Wow......Profound.....er, not

AND

“When you're living your life, you're so inside your head, you're swirling around in your own pain, that its hard to see how obvious it is to the people around you. These songs I was writing felt coded and secret.”   Oh, poor you...

AND

All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and I think whose hand you commit to holding.” Ugh, pass the hand sanitiser....

AND 

“When you really love someone, sometimes the things they need may hurt you, and some people are worth hurting for.”   Wow, I see you and raise you this by Donny Rumsford former Defence Secretary to President George W Bush: there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. Suck on that Daisy Jones!!!

Okay that's it for now.  Join me again sometime for another instalment of my Bad Book Blog. Toodle pip!