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vcmwI just scrolled past a review of Kristin Cashore's book Bitterblue on a blog site I like. And it reminded me.
I would pay large sums of cash money for an alien device I could wave over books, that would warn me if they contained significant thematic parental abuse, especially of a sexual nature. I would, in fact, probably go into the low four figures for such a device. Seriously. I feel I have had enough of this for all time.
The book was well enough written and I'm sure will have a large audience. It's one of those I'd have reluctantly recommended as a librarian, trying to separate my personal response from my professional one.
Along with the abuse thing, there was the Inconvenient Character's Death. A lot of books and movies set up a character who we have mixed feelings towards. We pity this character, but they've done things the narrative presents as unforgivable. Or we love this character, but they put the other characters in a morally or practically untenable position. Disaster looms above our protagonists, who have no good options to take in deciding how to deal with this character. Then the character conveniently dies / is killed by a villain / suicides.
Boo. Either have your protags kill them and deal with the consequences, or have your protags not kill them and deal with the consequences. Don't have your protags nobly squirm on the hook about it and then have some convenient third party take the problem out of your hands. That is cheating in my reader-book.
Cashore gets a bit of a pass because I don't think empathetic sensitive YA protagonists are allowed by genre conventions to kill sympathetic characters and retain their Good Protagonist status. But still and all, I'm reluctant to hand out the pass because the whole thematic point of the book was dealing like an adult, in the real world, with the consequences of horrible actions. So way to undercut theme there.
