YABookgate

[Kari Kamiya]

and even Nora Roberts

That's only because she and Danielle Steel (who's been married and divorced five different times btw lel) shit out books like every year and they're just rehashed plots in different settings. They got the romance formula down to a "T" since they basically forged it into their own image.

 

[Piga Dgrifm]

Nice to see some sanity from a GoodReads poster here (It's about that book with the gay kids of the presidential candidates that everyone is desperate to #cancel.)

 

[dirtydeanna96]

Tolkien in "on fairy stories" said that fairy tales shouldn't be left to only the nursery school. That good books are be good books at any age. Whether it be the Odyssey or Narnia.
Likewise with bad books
He's a big part of the reason I decided to become an English major.
Stories have a kind of power.

 

[Hazel Motes]

Nice to see some sanity from a GoodReads poster here (It's about that book with the gay kids of the presidential candidates that everyone is desperate to #cancel.)
View attachment 1358513

I hate how she has to reiterate common sense thinking. Young people aren't that dumb. We must have all viewpoints. The thought process of those on Twitter trying to cancel this book is as limited as the character limit itself.

 

[GeorgiaGuidestones]

My parents were like this. As an example, I wasn't allowed to read Nicholas Sparks because there was suggestive content. Nothing explicit, but characters were implied to have sex. My brother actually went through a long period where he barely read at all because his only options were middle grade, or YA that was mainly female centric (or classics, which can be heavy reads for a young teen). He did eventually find a niche he liked, but I think that it was a bigger struggle for him than it was for me, as a teen girl (thus in the demographic), to find something that appealed to him.

I was very lucky. I started reading steamy romance when I was 13. I was hiding it from my parents thinking I would get in trouble. Well I was caught by a teacher with one of those books. To my shock, my parents told the school I can read whatever I want since they always encouraged us to read.

I remember my mom saying next time don’t get caught and please move on to another genre. My parents were pretty progressive on that subject.
On the flip side, I have a 40 year old cousin who still reads Harry Potter once a year and loves to announce it on Facebook.

She fits the stereotype perfectly. Glasses, danger hair, fat, and suffers from TDS.

 

[Mola Ram]

On the flip side, I have a 40 year old cousin who still reads Harry Potter once a year and loves to announce it on Facebook.

She fits the stereotype perfectly. Glasses, danger hair, fat, and suffers from TDS.

How's she doing with JK Rowling's impermissible TERFiness?

 

[GeorgiaGuidestones]

How's she doing with JK Rowling's impermissible TERFiness?

Not sure since everything is #BLM right now but if she posts something I’ll screenshot it and add it.

 

[Mola Ram]

Not sure since everything is #BLM right now but if she posts something I’ll screenshot it and add it.

She's getting crucified on Twitter today for daring to suggest that it's ridiculous to refer to "people who menstruate" rather than "women." I don't know if the regularly scheduled Two Minutes' Hate goes across social media platforms or not.

 

[Slowboat to China]

This whole business of YA for boys got me thinking. When I was a wee li'l shitlord, Animorphs was the big thing in the fourth- to eighth-grade range, once you got done with Goosebumps. Harry Potter was a phenomenon for boys and girls alike, but once the movies started coming out, I definitely think the fandom was skewing female. But I really have no idea what guys were reading once we got done with those weird kids who could turn into animals.

I actually just called up my little brother (ten years younger than me) to ask what kind of stuff he was reading when he was twelve or fourteen. The TL;DR was that he got almost nothing from the library or the bookstore; pretty much everything was from our eclectic home collection of history, military fiction, sci-fi, classics and random shit. He remembers really liking "Starship Troopers" (the book, not the movie) and thought the Narnia books were pretty good. When he was in the YA target age range, he wanted action, adventure, and independent characters getting shit done. Female main characters and romance subplots were OK, but the focus had to be on doing something, not worrying about relationships or what other people thought of you.

So it seems like YA aimed at boys should focus more on external struggles than internal ones. My brother specifically mentioned the importance of themes that were of interest to boys--independence, action, fighting back, developing strength. Young him did not want to read about how hard it is to fit into society if that society wasn't actively trying to murder the protagonist.

So yeah, sample group of one. But I found it interesting. Maybe the lack of YA for boys is just a side effect of the whole genre slewing more into stories about emotions, relationships, fitting in, etc. Less focus on old-fashioned adventure.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

The lack of YA books for teenage boys are probably why it is a lot of them tend to lean toward anime/manga (comic books by extension, but maybe not nowadays, I guess), least this appears to have been the case for one of my younger brothers when he was entering his last years in school. He was never a big reader, but thanks to us older siblings being into anime and having some manga of our own, he decided to enter the world of manga in high school, and luckily for him his school had some volumes in the library he'd check out. So that's typically what he reads nowadays, but he's at least reading (and appears to have found his way into the military/historical genre of manga for the time being, so that's cool), which is all anyone can ask for.

This is why the ye olden mantra of "comic books are EEEEEEVIL" was and still is so silly. Comics and manga may just come off as more "advanced" picture books, but they typically give boys what they're looking for while "tricking" them into reading. The big draw mostly is that the pictures will usually have the boys/men be cool and awesome and the girls/women are hot eye candy, so that's always a plus for the growing boy, but the reward for sticking with those comics are moral lessons, heroes they can look up to, and maybe some interesting story-telling. It sounds like a lot of schools these days have a small collection of manga in the library (usually I think from donations) and they'll have a range from shoujo to shounen, so no one feels like they're being excluded from manga. (But it's still rather niche, so that's why only the geeks will go after them, still leaving the non-geek boys yearning for books they want to read.)

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

I think I may have found the worst book ever published by a legitimate publisher. I'm quite serious. Every once in a while I go looking for candidates, and this time I found a dilly. It appears to be some sort of Ghetto Wish Fulfillment Mean Girls crossed with Jackie Collins while at the same time making far less sense than either of them.

Hollywood High (Hollywood High #1) - They’re the daughters of celebrities—the kind all the teen mags gossip about! But the It Girls of Hollywood High are about to discover that fame has a price. And no friendship—or romance—is safe….
London Phillips will diet as her mother demands. She’ll even date the billionaire her mother has chosen for her. But she won’t give up her secret hottie, Justice Banks. She and Justice plan to elope—right after he becomes a hip-hop superstar. All he has to do is seduce a media mogul’s darling daughter, Rich Montgomery, and a record deal is his! But he better remember London is really his girl…

Rich is so lucky to have a BFF like London. It was London who introduced her to dreamy Justice. Little does she know that her new heartthrob is about to cause a media explosion that will change this spoiled princess’s life forever…

Spencer Ellington hates to see a billionaire go to waste. That’s why she’s hooking up with London’s boyfriend, Anderson Ford. London may not be in love with Anderson, but she believes he’ll do anything for her. Just wait till she finds out the only thing Anderson is doing is Spencer…

Heather Cummings wants in with the It Girls to secure the spotlight for her actress mother.

But when she stumbles upon a secret about the father she never knew, she discovers she has ties to the clique so scandalous it may just bring Hollywood High’s in-crowd to their knees!

Pretty standard fare for this sort of thing, if a tad on the salacious for supposed high school students. Where this shines is in its prose. First, there are four point of view characters, all of whom sound utterly identical. Second, there's the nuts and bolts prose, examples follow. Third, there's the plot, which is borderline to being insane. I can't even begin to describe it. So I decline.



Note that the snips do come from random pages, but make about as much sense as if they were sequential. They are all from a scene inside the high school cafeteria.

Proudly published by Kensington Publishing, possibly the largest publisher of fiction outside the Big 5, though Baen may come close. Although independent in the sense that they choose their own listings, the books are sold and distributed through Penguin Random House.

The publisher listing page:
Hollywood High

Hollywood High

archived 7 Jun 2020 22:35:10 UTC

archive.is

To any budding author out there, this is your competition.

 

[Mola Ram]

To any budding author out there, this is your competition.

 

[Captain Hastings Official]

You low down, dirty, stank-a-dank, skid row, Cracker Jack booger! You and your no-good rickety-crickety, drunken mother tried to ruin me!

What the fuck.

 

[Mola Ram]

What the fuck.

I am seriously wondering if this is some kind of bizarre parody.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Note that the snips do come from random pages, but make about as much sense as if they were sequential. They are all from a scene inside the high school cafeteria.

Wait, what do you mean those were from different pages and not from the same two pages or so? What're you even talking about?

EDIT:

What the fuck.

I mean, at least it's a piece of dialogue, but who the hell talks like that? For real?

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

I am seriously wondering if this is some kind of bizarre parody.

I would normally rule that out, but now I am not so sure. Neither author page at the publisher site has a picture.

https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/author/ni-ni-simone/

Ni-Ni Simone - Kensington Books Publishing

archived 7 Jun 2020 23:10:48 UTC

archive.is

https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/author/amir-abrams/

Amir Abrams - Kensington Books Publishing

archived 7 Jun 2020 23:12:34 UTC

archive.is

Both authors have twitter accounts, and both accounts went silent in 2016 and 2017.

https://twitter.com/IamNiNiSimone/with_replies - Last Tweet 03/10/2017

https://twitter.com/ItsyaboyAmir/with_replies - Last Tweet 02/21/2016

Can't be bothered to archive the whole thing. Meh.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Wait, what do you mean those were from different pages and not from the same two pages or so? What're you even talking about?

At this point I'm not quite sure myself.

edit: I checked my phone. It is continuous. I was just grabbing random bits of exposition and dialog and it just so happened to be sequential. Didn't plan it that way.

 

[Daughter of Cernunnos]

That reminds me of a YA book I once read where a nerdy girl is crushed but her brain is ok and a model has brain death so they transfer her brain into the model. But less sexually perverse.

Eva was an interesting YA book i ran into as a kid. A girl wakes up with her brain suddenly in a gorilla because she was in a car accident and would have died otherwise. She ends up going to live with a bunch of other gorillas because she cant live as a person now and gets the joy of going through gorilla "heat".

Think it wins oddest book I've ever read.

Airhead (novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Airhead (novel) - Wikipedia

archived 7 Jun 2020 23:31:14 UTC

archive.is

Scott Westerfield is pandering to BLM activists on twitter. I read a couple of his books in the uglies series but I didn't like it and it felt like rly petty shite trying too hard to be deep and philosophical. He always had a preachy tone to me. Here's his shit take tweet about how vandalizing statues is correcting disinformation.

https://twitter.com/ScottWesterfeld/status/1269706249937072128

https://archive.vn/OT7go

 

[QuokkaCaptain]

That reminds me of a YA book I once read where a nerdy girl is crushed but her brain is ok and a model has brain death so they transfer her brain into the model. But less sexually perverse.

Airhead (novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

http://archive.md/jmnHI

Scott Westerfield is pandering to BLM activists on twitter. I read a couple of his books in the uglies series but I didn't like it and it felt like rly petty shite trying too hard to be deep and philosophical. He always had a preachy tone to me. Here's his shit take tweet about how vandalizing statues is correcting disinformation.

https://twitter.com/ScottWesterfeld/status/1269706249937072128

https://archive.vn/OT7go

Uglies started off intriguing for me, and then dipped off into just a rambling series of things I just didn't give a fuck about. I am not even a little shocked that Scott Westerfield is pandering, because iirc his book "Afterworlds" (or whatever the fuck it was called) had a main character regurgitate some totally unnecessary hints of race-related virtue-signaling in it.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Uglies started off intriguing for me, and then dipped off into just a rambling series of things I just didn't give a fuck about. I am not even a little shocked that Scott Westerfield is pandering, because iirc his book "Afterworlds" (or whatever the fuck it was called) had a main character regurgitate some totally unnecessary hints of race-related virtue-signaling in it.

His alternate history World War I series (Leviathan) with British riding on genetically engineered dinosaurs and in giant flying jellyfish vs. Germans driving steampunk AT-ATs was pretty good. Silly, but eminently readable. Need to finish it at some point. Now that I've put aside my scruples about piracy, who needs Interlibrary Loan?

His YA Urban/Contemporary Fantasy series (serieses?) are an unmemorable glop of special snowflakes, girl power, and love triangles. I've read several books in both Midnighters and Zeroes and damned if I could tell you anything about any of them at this point. Except for the character in Zeroes that is almost impossible to remember. That was kind of interesting, how he got through life. Did like So Yesterday, a standalone YA Urban/Contemporary Fantasy that goes all the way back to 2004.

Everything about Uglies made me want to gouge my eyes out with a spork. Stupid plot, stupid characters, stupid world-building. Stupid me for reading a couple of the books.

He seems to be getting worse as a writer the more time goes on. In the nineteenth century the more Christian a writer got, the worse they got. In the 21st century, I guess we can say the same thing about commitment to the Church of Social Justice.