Adventures in teen literature
Aug. 10th, 2008 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeI am currently reading Joel and Cat Set the Record Straight, a teen novel by Nick Earls (Brisbane's leading author of lad-lit) and Rebecca Sparrow (Brisbane's leading author of chick-lit). As I loathe both authors' work in general, you may ask why I'm trying to read their teen fiction. Answer: it was free. I'm a simple soul at heart, really.
Anyway, it wasn't a bad read for the first few chapters, despite an overwhelming desperation on the parts of the authors to be seen as Being Down With The Kids. This mostly expresses itself in the form of cultural references that are already out of date, like Paris Hilton's musical career. It lost me, though, when the seventeen-year-old male protagonist describes a restaurant as "being on the verge of taking itself too seriously". I consulted with people who used to be seventeen-year-old males, and the consensus was that at that age, they would have been more interested in whether there was food, how much, and would there be tits. Also, what kind of wanker goes around saying that about restaurants, unless he's a food critic or Gordon Ramsay, etc.
On a related note, I was playing my favourite game of reading one-star Amazon reviews, and I found one for a Judy Blume book -- Just As Long As We're Together, I think -- which said, "With its themes of parental divorce and separation, this book was totally unsuitable for my sixth-grade daughter".
My parents separated for the first time when I was in the fifth grade, and I had this delightful mental image of myself saying to them, "But you can't break up! It's not age-appropriate!"
Anyway, it wasn't a bad read for the first few chapters, despite an overwhelming desperation on the parts of the authors to be seen as Being Down With The Kids. This mostly expresses itself in the form of cultural references that are already out of date, like Paris Hilton's musical career. It lost me, though, when the seventeen-year-old male protagonist describes a restaurant as "being on the verge of taking itself too seriously". I consulted with people who used to be seventeen-year-old males, and the consensus was that at that age, they would have been more interested in whether there was food, how much, and would there be tits. Also, what kind of wanker goes around saying that about restaurants, unless he's a food critic or Gordon Ramsay, etc.
On a related note, I was playing my favourite game of reading one-star Amazon reviews, and I found one for a Judy Blume book -- Just As Long As We're Together, I think -- which said, "With its themes of parental divorce and separation, this book was totally unsuitable for my sixth-grade daughter".
My parents separated for the first time when I was in the fifth grade, and I had this delightful mental image of myself saying to them, "But you can't break up! It's not age-appropriate!"
