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- Oct 28, 2018
Nostalgia compels me to hope that an Animorphs movie will be good, but given that Artemis Fowl was an incoherent garbage fire of a movie, my pessimism is kicking into overdrive.
YABookgate
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Nostalgia compels me to hope that an Animorphs movie will be good, but given that Artemis Fowl was an incoherent garbage fire of a movie, my pessimism is kicking into overdrive.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
Douglas Adams said:
July’s Most Anticipated Young Adult Books
I think the most depressing thing about this list is how similar it is to last month's list, (my analysis here) and how similar the items on this month's list are to each other. Is there anything on this list a young man would want to read? Nope, not from where I'm sitting.
Girl, Serpent, Thorn - This looks mildly interesting, but also kinda, well, boring. Definitely not for me, at any rate.
Cinderella Is Dead - Oh, look. A brave, feminist reinterpretation of a beloved fairy tale. Never heard of anyone writing one of those before. Plus, lesbians. Plus let's make the MC black. How could a YA librarian in 2020 NOT buy this?
The Damned - Vampires in late Renaissance Paris. Nobody's ever done that before. Oh, wait, this obscure author named Anne Rice wrote a book nobody's read called The Vampire Lestat once upon a time.
The Extraordinaries - A queer coming of age story featuring superpowers, ADHD and fanfiction. Can't dudes just be friends any more?
More Than Maybe - A white chick and a white dude find romance over "Indie music." Of course since neither of them are gay, the male MC's brother has to be. And this must be noted in the blurb.
Unravel the Dusk - YA alternate history fantasy set in what I presume is medieval China. Funny how you can write a book about China of that period without discussing female footbinding but can't write a book about the antebellum South without discussing slavery. I'm also dubious about how common miniskirts were in China at that time, but perhaps I'm wrong. (See the cover.)
Burn Our Bodies Down - When the day finally comes that YA is written by AI programs I imagine it will read like this. The blurb reads like some sort of YA checklist.
Today Tonight Tomorrow - Academic high school rivals find Romance on the last day of class. Amazingly the rivals are one male and one female. Not sure I'd think that without proof after seeing the author's picture, but this is the case.
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2014
At this point I do kind of look down on any adult whose main reading experience is in YA. I don't want to, at least they're actually reading something, but I think you could actually get more out of children's literature than anything being pumped out in YA now. There's just so little substance to anything being written for that demographic, exceptions to this are few and far between. It's not even that I have a problem with reading books written for a younger audience, because I can still enjoy books meant for elementary or middle school aged kids more than YA. Often when I listen to BookTubers talking about YA releases, it just feels like they're describing the same handful of books over and over again.
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2018
Are male authors just being booted from YA for being men or what? Is that why there isn't anything for young boys to read? Hell, I'd do it myself but I truly don't know if I could do it justice, being a woman and all. Teenage boys deserve good books just as much as teenage girls. At this point, stuff like Frank Peretti's Veritas Project series is the best I've seen lately, and that's very clearly Christian, meaning a lot of boys already might not be interested.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Do any "young adults" actually read YA at all? My impression is that's it's now written entirely by and for adults-in-name-only.
DungeonMaster
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2016
Absofuckinglutely not, except for the girls in the reading group I used to go to. Seeing a boy with a book is so rare that when I do, it's a sci-fi novel published before the 2000s. The only exception are the chinese exchange students reading Cultivation novels during lunchtime.
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2014
Not much. Most either read adult books or keep reading kids' stuff. If they've lost interest in kids' stories and either find adult books too challenging or have parents that don't allow them to read them, a lot of people just stop reading around this age. It's not just the political soapboxing causing this problem, it's that altogether what gets marketed to this age group is so narrow in variety. Most YA I see talked about on BookTube fall into at least one of these;
1. Love triangle with supernatural creatures.
2. Love triangle in a dystopia.
3. "Issues" book that's more like an after-school special.
4. Love triangle in a "dark/gritty" Fairytale retelling
And if you're not interested in any of those, it's a challenge to find something else, short of going back a few decades, which means the books may be more difficult to get and kids would be less likely to hear about them anyway unless it was a particularly noteworthy one.
So, yeah, it is mostly stunted adults reading this stuff. Again, I'm glad when a person at least reads something, but on the outside looking in, when an adult reads absolutely nothing but YA, it does seem pretty shallow. Especially when you can find books on the same topics that have been written for adults and delve into the issues much more deeply. But, then again, after looking at GoodReads reviews and seeing what will get these folks to DNF and 1 star a book, I think they'd be unable to handle an adult book that discusses the realities of racism or homophobia, since the most mild of bad-things happening to a minority protagonist in YA (like being called a name) makes them lose their shit.
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2020
Horrifically boring. I am too autistic for this shit.
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2018
TBH, if I'm on goodreads and I see this one reviewer give something a bad or lukewarm review, I'll reconsider dismissing it because what they consider peak importance and 'Everyone must read' is garbage like The Hate U Give. Same with a lot of booktubers, as they call themselves. Girls who sit on the floor with fairy lights on their bookshelves, all which are filled with YA and multiple slipcovers of Harry Potter, and talk about how a comic about gay teens is SO CUTE and WHOLESOME and OMIGOD GUYS IT'S SOOOO GOOD.
They never articulate why it's good, other than "It's so important and wholesome!". Which is an overused word now because of these people. When I think of books I enjoy, I usually pick out a few scenes and explain why the characterization works for me. I'm not well-versed into the technical part of writing, but I can usually spend a few minutes describing why the start of A Game of Thrones pulled me in and how I like the wording and atmosphere. But these girls - reviewers - never do.
Harry Potter is an important book because they grew up with it.
The HATE U Give is important because it was written by a black woman.
Lesbian Ariel YA books are important because representation.
The Name of the Wind is a BAD book because it's a MALE POWER FANTASY and written by a man and UNREALISTIC.
That's as far as they go. In this day and age where drunk Wisconsiners can convince me to watch horror movies based on their reviews, Book Reviewers can pull up their bootstraps and explain themselves in better terms than buzzwords on why I should take time out of my life to read their new bedside Idpol porn. If they start off with "Representation" or "Cover Porn", they deserve their 'pretty collection' moulding into dust.
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2020
Here's some last name lunacy from one of my favorite Twitter lolcows:
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
Oh, good ol' LL McKinney. This dummy's stuff floats by my feed on a semiregular basis. For the edification of the thread, here's her magnum opus. It's YA identity politics bingo!
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
Rothfuss is literally underwriting the operation of a feminist bookstore at least in part so you won't think this. They took his money but don't want his input, or that's how I read the "silent partner" bit.
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
I guess she’s assuming that these white authors spend all their time on Twitter so they’ll be available to immediately correct such occurrences.
What if a talented black author wrote a book instead of L.L. McKinney?
What if they already have and you can buy them now?
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2020
She's a great cow, isn't she? Endless milk as she's on Twitter 24/7, always raging about one thing or another. I wonder if she has a job or her "job" is Twitter sperging.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
You have to endure a lot of lunacy when you follow "writer Twitter."
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2014
1. How often does this happen that you consider it this huge problem?
2. Unless they’re constantly Googling their name, they aren’t going to know all the lists they’re put on.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
That comic book she's doing looks like ... hmmm .... something.
DC DEBUTS FIRST LOOK AT 'NUBIA: REAL ONE'
Is that art as bad as I think it is, or am I so biased against this immediately I'm judging it unfairly?
Let Monsters Fuck
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
A bit late to the party, but Wendy Xu/AngrygirLcomics is also a bit of a cow in YA twitter herself (crossover with comics twitter, too). She's relatively unremarkable from the rest of the fold: likes to virtue signal and scream at yts like any other of these people, and talks about how hard it is being an Asian woman in Trump's America. It's been a while since I've paid attention to her, but she worked for some publisher in NYC yet somehow managed to not live in a shithole with 3 other people--oh, wait, her father is some kind of lawyer. Of course she comes from money but never really talks about her financial privilege. She also has a 6-figure deal from HarperCollins for 3 GNs). Despite claiming ultra progressiveness she will tongue Phillip Pullman's asshole at any given moment and even got one of those fancy daemon statues that went out to promote the His Dark Materials show.
I think her most memorable moment was a few years ago when she was screeching about how calling a mung bean-based tofu "tofu" was culturally appropriation and she was losing her shit (the Chinese character for soybean is in the name). Wished I had saved it.
Azovka
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2018
I really enjoyed The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, but with that being said, it really is a male power fantasy, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. That’s literally what it is - an escapist fantasy for boys with a seemingly overpowered protagonist (legit, his flaws are being rash and cocky).
The only negative point I’d have to say about the series, and it’s mostly pertaining to the second book, is - DENNA. Holy shit, Denna / Diana, whatever.
Just remove that entire romantic subplot, and the books would be perfect imho. Or make it credible, because as it stands, even with the mandatory suspension of disbelief in fantasy, that romance ain’t it, chief.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I’d have to add “relationships with women” as a whole to my “only negative point”. Book 2 is literally Kvothe just shagging faeries, Amazon expies, and random girls picked up in taverns because losing his virginity made him a God of Sex somehow.
So yes, when I read the negative reviews on GoodReads, those are some things I can agree with. Nonetheless, it’s not worth screeching or being triggered about, and the overall quality of the series and writing outshines by far the dismal romance.
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2019
I always wondered after Potter and Hunger Games what the next big trend in YA would be and I never could have imagined something as fucking lame as wokeness.
Why is she wearing a shirt that says "BENES", is that supposed to sound like BENIS?
That comic book she's doing looks like ... hmmm .... something.
DC DEBUTS FIRST LOOK AT 'NUBIA: REAL ONE'
Is that art as bad as I think it is, or am I so biased against this immediately I'm judging it unfairly?
Why is she wearing a shirt that says "BENES", is that supposed to sound like BENIS?