Cohn, Rachel. Gingerbread
You know how in the English dub of Sailor Moon the characters keep using embarrassingly silly outdated slang until you want to strangle them? Well, you probably don't. But Gingerbread would give you a pretty good idea.
White girls who are richer than God should not say "yo" or "dawg" or "sumpin' sumpin'" without at least a little irony.
The main character in a book, especially if she is also the first-person narrator, ought to be either likeable or interesting. If the terrible, terrible slang weren't enough to make Cyd Charisse unlikeable, there's also the fact that she cuts herself and shoplifts and Oh god I'm SO tormented by my CRUEL UNFAIR PARENTS and doesn't really stop to think that, hello, she's richer than God and her family loves her, and maybe she might just be such a teensy bit spoiled.
I'm not saying that money does, or should, buy happiness. But a girl in Syd's position who thinks that her life is utterly horrible needs a clue-by-four upside the head, now.
A girl whose hobbies are self-destruction, random lust after every creature with XY chromosomes and a pulse, and making coffee also is not that interesting.
Somehow we are to believe that she is magically cured of all that ails her after three weeks in Manhattan with her biological father and half-siblings. Without any details of how such a change might have come about. Okay, I'll grant that New York is pretty awesome, but still.
For all that I wasted some of my teenage years moaning about the stupidity of all people my age, even the me of then would have acknowledged that real teenagers are not this dumb.
5 comments:
I have just a tiny bit more patience than you; I didn't want to smack Cyd on the head and say "shut up already, spoiled rich girl" until the second book.
I cannot believe it costs to become a member of Metafilter! The gall is astounding!
Anyhow, I post this here to get you the information you need: ignore these people who are saying not to fly to an interview. For a government job in a library you cannot expect them to pay for an interview--companies should, but gov't agencies simply will not, for many reasons. Also, potential employers, regardless of sector, are primarily concerned with whether you will stay in the job. If you fly out specifically to get the job and let them know this, your chances of getting the job will increase exponentially.
However, this doesn't mean one should pay an inordinate amount of money--try to go as cheaply as you can, and only go once or twice for the perfect dream job.
By the way, what the hell do you expect from a "Young Adult" book? And since when did adults start reading children's books in America? Shame.
Wow. I can not really tell if you're serious or not.
I absolutely understand that I can't expect a public library to fly me out for an interview. That's a separate question from whether it's a good idea to gamble away $500 that I don't really have.
As to the second:
I expect YA books to be good, like I did when I was a teenager. I was pretty consistently disappointed then, too. (Mysteriously, I was less disappointed by badly-written adult fantasy.) Clearly there are enough good ones that it's not unreasonable for me to expect that.
Also, did you miss the part about me wanting to be a youth services librarian? 'Cause I would kind of like to be a competent one.
By the way, I'm Canadian. A lot of what I do makes people think "In America? Shame." But I don't see what that has to do with anything.
I think this book is great. Probably because im a teenager myself. Geez
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