From May 11, 2016
Those publicists just can’t stop barking up the wrong tree.
I have been invited to review a book “set against the mysterious and sexy backdrop of Southern Cuba”–actually, she lost me right there–that “follows the young Thalia Vandergruen as she searches for her true identity with the help of trusted clairvoyant Sofi…”
Stop already. Have you ever known anyone actually named “Thalia”? I haven’t. And what’s with “Sofi”? That’s not how you spell Sophia, or Sophie. And she’s a clairvoyant. Uncle! Uncle!
But wait, there’s more. If you think those are silly names, Thalia meets this guy named “Yahriel–” (You should see how my spell check is reacting to these names. You’d think Joe Collidge wrote this.)
Stop, I can’t take any more. And this by a supposedly best-selling author. I checked: she’s a real person. I’m not giving her name because I prefer not to hurt her feelings. And anyhow the issue is not her, or her particular book, but the kind of drivel that keeps oozing out of our publishing industry. This example is pitched especially to women, in the category “women’s fiction.” But I will not have that said about women.
“What sets it apart,” concludes the publicist, “is the author’s signature smart bent and social conscience.” Great merciful heavens–does that mean what I think it means? The poor defenseless reader! I can’t think of anything good to say about “social conscience” in fiction.
I’m always looking for books to read and review, but this will not be one of them.
Apparently you’re somewhere at the top of their list of go-to reviewers. Sorry, Lee. This is one reason I much prefer non-fiction, and even then, one must be careful. So much of ‘history’ has been rewritten, rendering it useless, and other non-fiction of the modern type also requires discernment. Sigh . . .
Doesn’t sound like anything I would want to waste time on. Strangely enough, I once knew a girl named Thalia in middle school, way back in the day. I won’t give her last name, but she was Italian, and we also had a Greek girl with a different sort of name- couple of ordinary kids though.
I seem to remember a time when people were a lot more rooted in reality, than they seem to be now. A book like this would have been laughed off the bookshelf, not that many years ago.
How right you are.
Ok, maybe I’m properly logged on and perhaps my comment will actually post.
I miss the days when reality was in fashion and books like this would be much less popular.
Amen
When I was in my teens, no one I went to school with would have wanted to admit that they were immersed in fantasy. If someone read a book of fantasy, that was fine, but being so immersed that you acted like the characters are actually alive, that would not have gone over well.
It seems like that started to happen in the late ‘70s. People would watch Star Wars numerous times and stand out in the weather for hours when new Star Wars movies came out, in order to be able to say that they saw it on the day of release. That would have labeled a person as a nut case when I was in High School.
Nowadays, being immersed in the most ridiculous of fantasy has become somehow fashionable. I don’t get it.
It is really weird.
The high school I went to was a fairly easygoing place, but if I had acted like kids do these days, at the very least, I would have been a social outcast.
Yes, it was different.
When I think about it, most of those kids were pretty good.