Thursday, April 15, 2010

Not Surrendering

Mike asked me the other day why I was working so hard to finish The Dead-Tossed Waves. The answer goes in three directions. None of them is particularly compelling.

First, I appear to have gone to school with the author. But no, wait, I think she actually just went to the same college I did. I'm pretty sure she was far enough behind me that we would never have overlapped. Not compelling.

Second, it's in a series and I read the first one. By that logic, I should read New Moon, and I never never never never never never never never will. So that one's out.

Third--and really, the only one that means much of anything--is it SEEMS like I should like it. If you gave me a synopsis, I'd jump all over it. If you gave me a one sentence teaser, I'd jump all over it. But God, I just don't like the book.

Now, I had dreamed up a couple of clever ways to blog about not liking this book. I think my favorite was going to be a matching quiz, in which four passages lifted from the book all describe the main character's hear throbbing in her ears/nearly pounding out of her chest/pumping the blood through her veins, and/or her breath stopping suddenly/coming raggedly/exploding outward, and/or her head swimming/her stomach heaving/her skin prickling in the damp summer air. And then these would need to be matched to the scene that they occurred in: a) a good looking boy accidentally brushes her hand, b) she tells her mother a fib, or c) she is chased up a deserted beach by a pack of flesh-eating zombies.

Also, a huge percentage of sentences in this book were actually sentence fragments. Incomplete. As though she were trying to find the right words to make her point, but couldn't. So she'd rephrase and repeat. Reiterate. Until you got it.

But I didn't write those clever posts, because it felt too mean.

And now I feel like a jerk. I'm going to go crawl into a hole now. Hide. Not come out till morning.

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