Reading Tai-bo
This week I turned from the gritty and realistic historical fiction in which babies die and not all dogs go to heaven, and plunged into a book titled: “Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo”. Yes that is right. I’m going to give titles occasionally. I stopped giving titles after reading a professional writing blog that stated it was very bad form for a writer to trash another writer’s work online. So…if I’m going to complain, the title will be absent. If I loved the book, I just might include it.
What did I learn from reading this week. That adults are fun to pick on in YA fiction. You may recall how awful most of the adults in the Harry Potter series were. Well Leven Thumps puts JK Rowling to shame in the awful caregiver category. The adults litter and eat five course meals in front of our heroine while she is forced to eat a blob of jam and crust. The adults make the hero sleep out on the back porch and lock the door at night, they move their fridges into the living room so that they can eat without moving and they drink from garden hoses strung through the window so as to avoid rising to drink. They have warts and weak chins and spill on their pajamas with wild abandon. The author’s creativity was astounding and it was actually difficult to read while eating anything due to the general awfulness of the hero’s caregivers. Very descriptive and despite the nausea I zoomed through the book and loved it.
