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Jan. 23rd, 2007 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
algToday I read some slush in which the author declared in the cover letter that the ms. was based on The Mists of Avalon and Independence Day and was yet completely original and unique.
Awesome.
In fact, all slush read today has been of similar quality, which is entertaining the hell out of me.
That's not what I want to write about today, though. What I want to write about is Garret Freymann-Weyr. She used to be the assistant to an agent with whom I often work, and the agent's current assistant hooked me up with a bunch of her books after I read and loved My Heartbeat.
In the last two days I've read When I Was Older and The Kings Are Already Here.
The former is about a girl whose younger brother died of lukemia. While the brother was dying, the father had an affair. After the death, the parents divorced. Now, a few years later, the mother is dating some kind of history professor whose wife died. He's got a kid who has a tear tattooed on his face. It's all very emotional and complex.
The latter is about a teenaged ballet dancer who is losing her focus on dance. So her mother sends her to Geneva to live with her father for a while, so that she can find her focus -- on dance, or on something else. The mother does not support the dance, but whatever, right? The father, it turns out, was the mother's father's best friend. After the mother's mother died, the mother and the best friend had an affair. Then the mother moved to Berlin, and didn't tell the guy that she'd had a kid. The guy accidentally found out two years later. The guy lives in Geneva where he works with refugees in Europe, and he has as his roommate a chess prodigy whom he saved and is helping, blah blah whatever. Obviously the girl and the chess prodigy become friends and find that they have a lot in common. As the chess prodigy becomes more focused on chess and more confident in his abilities, the dancer realizes that she is no longer focused on dance for real, and that she wants to stay in Geneva with her father and learn about the world.
I was struck by how very similar and yet different all these novels are. All the young adult characters in these novels have this crazy super self-awareness. They know everything about themselves and are on quests to learn more. It's exactly how I felt when I was 15 or 16 -- that I knew everything about myself that I could possibly know, and yet that wasn't enough, and I still didn't understand myself. At the same time, I felt everything very keenly, and was always very self-aware, to a painful degree.
I'm still this way, although I desperately want to ascribe those feelings to being a crazy teenager. I guess some people are just like this? Maybe everyone is, and I'm just mean in my head about how clueless a lot of people seem to be about their existence.
I have been told that I'm just too existentialist in the painful, distressing, life-ruining way, but I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it.
Anyway, these teenaged characters all have a degree of self-knowledge that the adults lack. Obviously this is a trope of YA novels -- especially ones for teenagers. I've noticed that a lot of times, in books for the 8 - 12 crowd, the kids learn stuff from the adults, or learn that they can do things by themselves, whereas in books for the 13+ crowd, a lot of the time the kids learn that adults are fallible and that kids have just as much or more of a capacity for emotion.
This is a total generalization based on the 15 YA books or whatever that I read per year. Usually I end up putting the newer ones down because the heroes and heroines are just babies mimicking adults in chick lit novels or on stupid sitcoms, and I don't have the patience for that.
Freymann-Weyr's books don't have this problem. However, particularly with The Kings Are Already Here, I was bored about halfway through, because the characters are so self-aware, and so emotionally developed -- what did they have to learn? What they seemed to be learning about life was how to relate to other people and understand that other people have foibles and quirks. But they knew this at the beginning of the book -- the lesson was just being driven home. So I found myself skimming the book, because I didn't understand -- what was the point?
And, frustratingly, the point was exactly what I thought it would be: just live your life and do what makes you happy, even when other people don't understand. Which both the main characters knew at the beginning.
I almost liked When I Was Older more than My Heartbeat. For one thing, it is practically a love letter to New York in a very positive way. Whereas in MH, the depictions of New York were very depressing because they were about depressed and confused people, in WIWO, the depictions of New York are really awesome and exciting.
Other differences between these books: In My Heartbeat, the main character is actually completely confused. She doesn't understand her own emotions, much less anyone else's. She's hyper-aware of the people around her, but not herself. What she comes to learn throughout the book is how to be aware of herself and also the people around her -- she learns how to be a presence in her own life instead of someone's shadow. But the book itself is kind of depressing in its realism, and the end of the book is about how things in life end and fade and then you move on and kind of forget about it all.
In When I Was Older, it's about how sometimes you can change but your life doesn't have to -- sometimes you can become a different person and still love the other people in your life. I like this message much better. I also thought the ending was more uplifting -- there was no epilogue about thirty years later, no nostalgic looking back. It was an ending about two people looking forward to the future, whatever it brings for them, whatever they bring to it -- together.
I have one more Freymann-Weyr book to get through, and then I will be going back to Lost Christianities, which is so far really interesting. It's dense though, so I don't read more than 15 or 20 pages per day. Plus I like to space it out -- I don't want to overdose on Paul and Thecla and the Gospel of Thomas, you know.
Here is something else, something not about books: in this post here,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anteka gives us a picspam of the Impala from Supernatural. If you are so inclined, at the bottom of the entry, after the pictures, there's a whole meta about how the car reflects Dean Winchester's emotional state. If you are not inclined, the pictures of the car are practically car porn, seriously. Mmm, Impala.
Anna out.
Awesome.
In fact, all slush read today has been of similar quality, which is entertaining the hell out of me.
That's not what I want to write about today, though. What I want to write about is Garret Freymann-Weyr. She used to be the assistant to an agent with whom I often work, and the agent's current assistant hooked me up with a bunch of her books after I read and loved My Heartbeat.
In the last two days I've read When I Was Older and The Kings Are Already Here.
The former is about a girl whose younger brother died of lukemia. While the brother was dying, the father had an affair. After the death, the parents divorced. Now, a few years later, the mother is dating some kind of history professor whose wife died. He's got a kid who has a tear tattooed on his face. It's all very emotional and complex.
The latter is about a teenaged ballet dancer who is losing her focus on dance. So her mother sends her to Geneva to live with her father for a while, so that she can find her focus -- on dance, or on something else. The mother does not support the dance, but whatever, right? The father, it turns out, was the mother's father's best friend. After the mother's mother died, the mother and the best friend had an affair. Then the mother moved to Berlin, and didn't tell the guy that she'd had a kid. The guy accidentally found out two years later. The guy lives in Geneva where he works with refugees in Europe, and he has as his roommate a chess prodigy whom he saved and is helping, blah blah whatever. Obviously the girl and the chess prodigy become friends and find that they have a lot in common. As the chess prodigy becomes more focused on chess and more confident in his abilities, the dancer realizes that she is no longer focused on dance for real, and that she wants to stay in Geneva with her father and learn about the world.
I was struck by how very similar and yet different all these novels are. All the young adult characters in these novels have this crazy super self-awareness. They know everything about themselves and are on quests to learn more. It's exactly how I felt when I was 15 or 16 -- that I knew everything about myself that I could possibly know, and yet that wasn't enough, and I still didn't understand myself. At the same time, I felt everything very keenly, and was always very self-aware, to a painful degree.
I'm still this way, although I desperately want to ascribe those feelings to being a crazy teenager. I guess some people are just like this? Maybe everyone is, and I'm just mean in my head about how clueless a lot of people seem to be about their existence.
I have been told that I'm just too existentialist in the painful, distressing, life-ruining way, but I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it.
Anyway, these teenaged characters all have a degree of self-knowledge that the adults lack. Obviously this is a trope of YA novels -- especially ones for teenagers. I've noticed that a lot of times, in books for the 8 - 12 crowd, the kids learn stuff from the adults, or learn that they can do things by themselves, whereas in books for the 13+ crowd, a lot of the time the kids learn that adults are fallible and that kids have just as much or more of a capacity for emotion.
This is a total generalization based on the 15 YA books or whatever that I read per year. Usually I end up putting the newer ones down because the heroes and heroines are just babies mimicking adults in chick lit novels or on stupid sitcoms, and I don't have the patience for that.
Freymann-Weyr's books don't have this problem. However, particularly with The Kings Are Already Here, I was bored about halfway through, because the characters are so self-aware, and so emotionally developed -- what did they have to learn? What they seemed to be learning about life was how to relate to other people and understand that other people have foibles and quirks. But they knew this at the beginning of the book -- the lesson was just being driven home. So I found myself skimming the book, because I didn't understand -- what was the point?
And, frustratingly, the point was exactly what I thought it would be: just live your life and do what makes you happy, even when other people don't understand. Which both the main characters knew at the beginning.
I almost liked When I Was Older more than My Heartbeat. For one thing, it is practically a love letter to New York in a very positive way. Whereas in MH, the depictions of New York were very depressing because they were about depressed and confused people, in WIWO, the depictions of New York are really awesome and exciting.
Other differences between these books: In My Heartbeat, the main character is actually completely confused. She doesn't understand her own emotions, much less anyone else's. She's hyper-aware of the people around her, but not herself. What she comes to learn throughout the book is how to be aware of herself and also the people around her -- she learns how to be a presence in her own life instead of someone's shadow. But the book itself is kind of depressing in its realism, and the end of the book is about how things in life end and fade and then you move on and kind of forget about it all.
In When I Was Older, it's about how sometimes you can change but your life doesn't have to -- sometimes you can become a different person and still love the other people in your life. I like this message much better. I also thought the ending was more uplifting -- there was no epilogue about thirty years later, no nostalgic looking back. It was an ending about two people looking forward to the future, whatever it brings for them, whatever they bring to it -- together.
I have one more Freymann-Weyr book to get through, and then I will be going back to Lost Christianities, which is so far really interesting. It's dense though, so I don't read more than 15 or 20 pages per day. Plus I like to space it out -- I don't want to overdose on Paul and Thecla and the Gospel of Thomas, you know.
Here is something else, something not about books: in this post here,
anteka gives us a picspam of the Impala from Supernatural. If you are so inclined, at the bottom of the entry, after the pictures, there's a whole meta about how the car reflects Dean Winchester's emotional state. If you are not inclined, the pictures of the car are practically car porn, seriously. Mmm, Impala.Anna out.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
De-lurking
Date: 2007-01-23 05:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 05:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 05:57 pm (UTC)Though I admit, that movie has some hot guys.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 08:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 08:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 10:57 pm (UTC)Car porn
Date: 2007-01-23 05:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 06:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 08:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 08:55 pm (UTC)I'm not sure which is more painful: the dreadful ideas, the appalling spelling, or the sad, adolescent earnestness of it all.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 10:55 pm (UTC)My thing on fanfic (if its well written) is why don't they just rename the characters, change one or two other details, and bill it as their own?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 07:59 pm (UTC)The Independence of Avalon?
uh...
The Mists of Independence of Avalon Day!
Wooot! We have a winner!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 09:00 pm (UTC)What an awful thought.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-23 10:20 pm (UTC)It would be funnier than anything else ever.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-26 02:00 am (UTC)Here are some other teen reads that I did love:
Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block (http://www.amazon.com/Weetzie-Bat-Francesca-Lia-Block/dp/0060736259/sr=8-1/qid=1169775752/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-7064471-4912061?ie=UTF8&s=books) (in case you somehow haven't read it)
Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn (http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780689843372-0)
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly (http://www.amazon.com/Northern-Light-Jennifer-Donnelly/dp/0152053107/sr=8-1/qid=1169775823/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-7064471-4912061?ie=UTF8&s=books)
Empress of the World by Sara Ryan (http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780142500590-0)
Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff (http://www.amazon.com/Make-Lemonade-Virginia-Euwer-Wolff/dp/0805080708/sr=8-1/qid=1169776050/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-7064471-4912061?ie=UTF8&s=books)
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan (http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-9780375824005-0)
(Just in case you have room in your 15 teen books...)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-27 02:58 am (UTC)