I'll be waiting with bated breath for your take on The Goblin Emperor.
It's so **frustrating** when a book has a cool idea, and then the story doesn't do the idea justice. I can see how it happens. I sometimes get cool ideas, but if I can't construct a good story around them, I let them lie for precisely that reason. Kraken was an example of a story with a superfluity of cool ideas, and they were even pretty coolly portrayed... and yet the story didn't support them well enough, to my mind. Whereas, Railsea, for me, did it perfectly: had cool ideas that were justified in the story, and well used in the story--integral.
I agree with you about the shoehorning in of romance. Imagine if there were some other arbitrary requirement--like what if all YA novels had to have a scene where a person rolls up their jean (has to be jeans) and reveals interesting socks. Imagine if in any book, we had to see how this element was brought in. Sometimes I feel like romance has about as much necessity.
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It's so **frustrating** when a book has a cool idea, and then the story doesn't do the idea justice. I can see how it happens. I sometimes get cool ideas, but if I can't construct a good story around them, I let them lie for precisely that reason. Kraken was an example of a story with a superfluity of cool ideas, and they were even pretty coolly portrayed... and yet the story didn't support them well enough, to my mind. Whereas, Railsea, for me, did it perfectly: had cool ideas that were justified in the story, and well used in the story--integral.
I agree with you about the shoehorning in of romance. Imagine if there were some other arbitrary requirement--like what if all YA novels had to have a scene where a person rolls up their jean (has to be jeans) and reveals interesting socks. Imagine if in any book, we had to see how this element was brought in. Sometimes I feel like romance has about as much necessity.