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rushthatspeaksSo when the big box of books from octopedingenue came some time ago, I went through it looking at things, and started mentally cataloging them into short, long, fantasy, literary fiction, graphic novels, a book I really really wanted to read that Kawy sent because she is psychic (Thief Eyes by Janni Lee Simner, previously reviewed here), etc.. There was a small category, composed mostly of Crazy Beautiful (the HOOKS FOR HANDS book) which I mentally marked as 'books Kawy has sent me because they are incredibly bad'.
When I got to the Francesca Lia Block, I had absolutely no idea whether to put it in that category or not. None whatsoever. Francesca Lia Block has written books I find lovely and memorable and magnificent (Ecstasia, Primavera, the early Weetzie Bat books, The Hanged Man) and books I find utterly neutral and have trouble remembering exist (Girl Goddess #9, that one about teenage fairies) and a couple of the worst frickin' books I've ever read (Blood Roses, Echo, Psyche in a Dress). I tend to like her earlier stuff better, but there is never any guarantee that an author has gone into a permanent decline and indeed one usually hopes otherwise. Her prose usually gets critic-words such as 'lush' and 'purple' and 'adjectival' and her main issue tends to be letting language, style, and a liking for reworked myth and fairytale get in the way of thinking things through or causing them to make sense. When she doesn't run away with herself, it can work very well, and there is usually no telling in advance with any particular book which side of the line it will fall on, which is why I keep picking her stuff up.
Then I saw this was a novel about teenage werewolves.
Whoa-boy. That settled that question. Teenage werewolves are quite popular lately, and there is an entire subgenre of them, and its tropes are such that unless this book were to happen to be completely unlike and unrelated to every other book about teenage werewolves ever written, I knew this book would not just have run away with the author, but plunged off a cliff at full throttle and exploded in a mass of fireworks over the canyon. There is such a thing as a genre playing to someone's strengths, and then there is the opposite. I was holding out vague hope for this being totally unlike everything else in its subgenre, but that particular hope is always vague: never expect a book to be sui generis, especially when the subject is trendy.
Apparently she's written a vampire one, too. I-- the mind boggles. I have to read that book.
Because this? This was delightfully, enjoyably, compulsively readably terrible. Usually when a Block novel fails, I wind up throwing it across a room and/or whimpering about how people do not work that way, dammit, but this was not infuriatingly bad, because there was never any hope, from page one, of its being anything other than bad, and so I never rose to infuriated; I spent the whole book in a state of mild facepalm. It was awesome.
Our heroine, Liv (Note Punning Symbolism Of Name), is a complete social outcast because she has a serious body hair problem. And her middle fingers are unusually long. And her lips are unusually red. And this one time at the age of thirteen she went totally crazy and tried to kill her mother and ran off into the woods and was gone all night and can't remember any of it.
I wonder what could possibly be going on here? Liv, who is extremely pop-music literate (in, to be fair, a plausible way) has apparently never read a book or seen a horror movie in her entire life, so she has no idea. (Usually Block characters do get to have seen movies. I am uncertain why this suddenly changed.)
Also she's dating one guy, but she can't tell her parents because he's black, so she's pretending to date her secretly gay best friend. This all works out precisely as stupidly as you think, including all the requisite jealousy-not-based-in-anything, social occasions where everyone stands around awkwardly, random necking in the poorly-concealed shrubbery, and thoughts about how no one in this town Will Ever Understand. At one point the secretly gay best friend gets a speech about how the guy who mysteriously disappeared fifty years ago from the now-haunted building was probably gay and killed himself and now is the haunting because in this town being gay means you must be a monster. Now you know everything you need to know about where his story arc is going. Sigh. (I correctly predicted the outcome of this arc on page three. It takes everyone else until page one hundred and twenty-seven, when it hits them completely by surprise.)
There is also complex angst involving Liv's mother, who is Sarah Palin. No, really. Like, not literally, but in every other way possible. The reason Liv is a werewolf is that her mother shot a wolf from a helicopter. Her mother's appearance, conversation, politics, preoccupations, and general terribleness-to-be-around are also cribbed directly from Sarah Palin. I cannot tell you how surreal this makes the reading experience. I kept expecting her to run for President. It was confusing.
And of course there is a hot-but-dangerous werewolf guy who lives in the woods and keeps telling Liv to kill everything. We all saw that coming, yes?
The book has an odd feeling of undeveloped-ness to it, too. There's all this setup and all these subplots, and then the resolutions to all of them take place in about two paragraphs each and you sit there going no wait come back what? And the language is an incredibly strange mixture of Block's genuinely grammatical and lyrical style mixed with everybody having jewel-tone eyes and metallic glowing hair and supernaturally awesome complexions.
Honestly the way I can best describe this is by saying that it reads like a very skilled, very professional writer doing incredibly idtastic and ridiculous Twilight fanfic, with a list of Vocabulary Required stapled to the wall in front of her, after just having watched an infuriating morning of CNN. I loved every minute of it and you should all go read it immediately if you at all enjoy reading bad books; it's not as epically world-shaking as Crazy Beautiful, but then, it doesn't need to be.
And you know what? My faith in Block's capacity to someday write another really good book has not been remotely shaken. This isn't that book, but she's not repeating herself; this is not terrible in the ways her previous bad books were terrible, so I continue to hope.
... I have no hope at all about the vampire book, mind you. Wow, I really have to read that.
In conclusion: SARAH PALIN.
octopedingenue came some time ago, I went through it looking at things, and started mentally cataloging them into short, long, fantasy, literary fiction, graphic novels, a book I really really wanted to read that Kawy sent because she is psychic (Thief Eyes by Janni Lee Simner, previously reviewed here), etc.. There was a small category, composed mostly of Crazy Beautiful (the HOOKS FOR HANDS book) which I mentally marked as 'books Kawy has sent me because they are incredibly bad'. When I got to the Francesca Lia Block, I had absolutely no idea whether to put it in that category or not. None whatsoever. Francesca Lia Block has written books I find lovely and memorable and magnificent (Ecstasia, Primavera, the early Weetzie Bat books, The Hanged Man) and books I find utterly neutral and have trouble remembering exist (Girl Goddess #9, that one about teenage fairies) and a couple of the worst frickin' books I've ever read (Blood Roses, Echo, Psyche in a Dress). I tend to like her earlier stuff better, but there is never any guarantee that an author has gone into a permanent decline and indeed one usually hopes otherwise. Her prose usually gets critic-words such as 'lush' and 'purple' and 'adjectival' and her main issue tends to be letting language, style, and a liking for reworked myth and fairytale get in the way of thinking things through or causing them to make sense. When she doesn't run away with herself, it can work very well, and there is usually no telling in advance with any particular book which side of the line it will fall on, which is why I keep picking her stuff up.
Then I saw this was a novel about teenage werewolves.
Whoa-boy. That settled that question. Teenage werewolves are quite popular lately, and there is an entire subgenre of them, and its tropes are such that unless this book were to happen to be completely unlike and unrelated to every other book about teenage werewolves ever written, I knew this book would not just have run away with the author, but plunged off a cliff at full throttle and exploded in a mass of fireworks over the canyon. There is such a thing as a genre playing to someone's strengths, and then there is the opposite. I was holding out vague hope for this being totally unlike everything else in its subgenre, but that particular hope is always vague: never expect a book to be sui generis, especially when the subject is trendy.
Apparently she's written a vampire one, too. I-- the mind boggles. I have to read that book.
Because this? This was delightfully, enjoyably, compulsively readably terrible. Usually when a Block novel fails, I wind up throwing it across a room and/or whimpering about how people do not work that way, dammit, but this was not infuriatingly bad, because there was never any hope, from page one, of its being anything other than bad, and so I never rose to infuriated; I spent the whole book in a state of mild facepalm. It was awesome.
Our heroine, Liv (Note Punning Symbolism Of Name), is a complete social outcast because she has a serious body hair problem. And her middle fingers are unusually long. And her lips are unusually red. And this one time at the age of thirteen she went totally crazy and tried to kill her mother and ran off into the woods and was gone all night and can't remember any of it.
I wonder what could possibly be going on here? Liv, who is extremely pop-music literate (in, to be fair, a plausible way) has apparently never read a book or seen a horror movie in her entire life, so she has no idea. (Usually Block characters do get to have seen movies. I am uncertain why this suddenly changed.)
Also she's dating one guy, but she can't tell her parents because he's black, so she's pretending to date her secretly gay best friend. This all works out precisely as stupidly as you think, including all the requisite jealousy-not-based-in-anything, social occasions where everyone stands around awkwardly, random necking in the poorly-concealed shrubbery, and thoughts about how no one in this town Will Ever Understand. At one point the secretly gay best friend gets a speech about how the guy who mysteriously disappeared fifty years ago from the now-haunted building was probably gay and killed himself and now is the haunting because in this town being gay means you must be a monster. Now you know everything you need to know about where his story arc is going. Sigh. (I correctly predicted the outcome of this arc on page three. It takes everyone else until page one hundred and twenty-seven, when it hits them completely by surprise.)
There is also complex angst involving Liv's mother, who is Sarah Palin. No, really. Like, not literally, but in every other way possible. The reason Liv is a werewolf is that her mother shot a wolf from a helicopter. Her mother's appearance, conversation, politics, preoccupations, and general terribleness-to-be-around are also cribbed directly from Sarah Palin. I cannot tell you how surreal this makes the reading experience. I kept expecting her to run for President. It was confusing.
And of course there is a hot-but-dangerous werewolf guy who lives in the woods and keeps telling Liv to kill everything. We all saw that coming, yes?
The book has an odd feeling of undeveloped-ness to it, too. There's all this setup and all these subplots, and then the resolutions to all of them take place in about two paragraphs each and you sit there going no wait come back what? And the language is an incredibly strange mixture of Block's genuinely grammatical and lyrical style mixed with everybody having jewel-tone eyes and metallic glowing hair and supernaturally awesome complexions.
Honestly the way I can best describe this is by saying that it reads like a very skilled, very professional writer doing incredibly idtastic and ridiculous Twilight fanfic, with a list of Vocabulary Required stapled to the wall in front of her, after just having watched an infuriating morning of CNN. I loved every minute of it and you should all go read it immediately if you at all enjoy reading bad books; it's not as epically world-shaking as Crazy Beautiful, but then, it doesn't need to be.
And you know what? My faith in Block's capacity to someday write another really good book has not been remotely shaken. This isn't that book, but she's not repeating herself; this is not terrible in the ways her previous bad books were terrible, so I continue to hope.
... I have no hope at all about the vampire book, mind you. Wow, I really have to read that.
In conclusion: SARAH PALIN.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-20 11:00 am (UTC):D
That's wonderful.
Okay, I just about want to read it, and generally I don't have time in my life for bad books, no matter how entertaining.
I only ever tried one Francesca Lia Block book--I think it was one of the teenage fairies ones--but I didn't get past the first page because I think it was one of a series and I could tell it was too wrapped up in current pop culture and coolness for me to be able to get into it.
Also, I resent her for having the same first name as me and being successful in a genre I like.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 12:24 am (UTC)I can understand that entirely.
Should you ever happen to feel like reading Francesca Lia Block, you probably want the omnibus of the Dangerous Angels series; the separate volumes start with Weetzie Bat. They are okay as YA coming-of-age novels but as love letters to Los Angeles they are unsurpassed in fiction, the first books that ever made me understand why anyone might possibly want to live there. I also really like her adult novels Ecstasia and Primavera which are dystopian Orpheus and Persephone retellings, but they're hard to find.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 03:03 am (UTC)I came up with Ecstasia in a used book store, but I've never been successful tracking down Primavera outside of a library.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-20 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-20 01:47 pm (UTC)*aneurysm*
Wow.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 06:46 am (UTC)BEST
no subject
Date: 2010-11-20 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-20 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-20 05:45 pm (UTC)There are one or two excellent stories in Girl Goddess # 9. At least, I really liked the one with the girls who are obsessed with this rock star, and then they meet him and he's a creep, and they find something else to obsess about - possibly I liked it because it portrayed fannishness as totally normal and cool.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-20 11:26 pm (UTC)I smell sequel.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 03:42 am (UTC)...I really don't need to write this.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 07:21 am (UTC)Then there's the subplot about the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy regarding fairies in the military. You don't want to know what the Fair Folk do if you ask.