I....will skip that one, then, because "mainstream lit-writer goes 'AHAH I WILL DO A BRILLIANT DECON OF $GENRETHING AND SHOW HOW BROKEN IT IS' while the genre has moved on to deconstructing the DECONSTRUCTION about ten years ago" is up there in my Least Favourite Things, and kind of insulting.
Also having read through it a couple of times I'm just . . . .mildly puzzled.
I mean, I'm actually all for stories that examine the warts of a potential magical world or magical system, but this literally seems to be an inversion of Narnia, and is thus just as silly. I mean, young people dream of and obsess about lots of things and imagine that if they could get at them everything would be perfect - equestrianism, ballet, sports, etc.
And then a lot of them go on to discover it's a bunch of hard work and for some of them the payoff is never enough and for some of them it is. To ignore that factor as applying to just about every human endeavour that exists again seems . . .. silly. Which I somehow doubt is the adjective Grossman is trying to get applied to his work, but really, it's the one that fits.
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Date: 2014-09-12 09:25 pm (UTC)Also having read through it a couple of times I'm just . . . .mildly puzzled.
I mean, I'm actually all for stories that examine the warts of a potential magical world or magical system, but this literally seems to be an inversion of Narnia, and is thus just as silly. I mean, young people dream of and obsess about lots of things and imagine that if they could get at them everything would be perfect - equestrianism, ballet, sports, etc.
And then a lot of them go on to discover it's a bunch of hard work and for some of them the payoff is never enough and for some of them it is. To ignore that factor as applying to just about every human endeavour that exists again seems . . .. silly. Which I somehow doubt is the adjective Grossman is trying to get applied to his work, but really, it's the one that fits.