sarah HANNAH gómez

about review policy ftc disclaimer resources pour vous

review policy

ftc disclaimer

resources pour vous

tweet

tumble

pin

read

internets i read

my writing elsewhere

I wanted to read Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar ( IndieBound ) the second it came out, even though I only felt so-so about the other book of hers I had read, The Uncoupling ( IB ). But even though I was super excited, I only finally got around to picking it up at work this week when a colleague returned it and I remembered that I had been dying to read it. I am mostly really glad I did, especially because my curiosity about the book was only increased when I saw how divisive reviews seem to be. Everyone is either amazed by the book or angered by it, it seems. I had to know why. Now I’ve read the book, and I can’t say that I get why everyone who didn’t like it is so angry, but that’s reading for you – we all react differently. (I will employ the slightest of spoilers in this post, because I don’t really care about spoilers, as they don’t tend to spoil things for me.) Continue reading →

Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)

Click to print (Opens in new window)

Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

Bored, dead-looking (ha. pun kind of intended), suffering through a horrible job.

I got a DVR this summer, and I’ve been really enjoying it. Too much. It was a terrible idea to purchase. Wonderfulterrible. It sure makes for more time wasting, but also more efficient time wasting, because no commercials. Y’know.

Anyway, it also makes for noticing when embarrassing things are on television so that you can record them – you know, just in case you’re really bored. Because you don’t have enough hours of television recorded already. And that is how I ended up watching the entire Twilight saga recently.

My history with Twilight is as follows: saw the movie New Moon in theaters with my sister because she begged me and because you shouldn’t really make a new mom sad. I had never read the books or seen the first movie, but whatever. When you live in society and pay even half attention to things, you know how to participate in conversations about Twilight or To Kill a Mockingbird without having read them. A few years later, in grad school, I had to read Twilight. So I got the first two installments, albeit out of order, against my will. And I felt done. Continue reading →

Sadly, I think the discussion on New Adult has been laid to rest. What it has decided it is is contemporary urban romance. It is not YA but with characters navigating college and first relationships and finding jobs in a bad economy, as originally proposed. There is a little of college happening in YA now, and that’s great, but I just don’t think New Adult is going to be anything but what it is now, and that’s that, I guess. I’m a little sad, but whatever. If YA and adult fiction both start to recognize that growing up and navigating first experiences happens well beyond prom, we’ll be fine.

Anyway, I’m actually really liking a new thing that authors are doing. That is, acknowledging their original legions of fans from the late 90s and early 00s, fans of YA and adultish series like the Jessica Darling books ( IndieB ound), The Princess Diaries ( IB ), Sweet Valley High ( IB ) (okay, that one is way earlier than the others), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants ( IB ). Quick backtrack: The fans of these books who are around my age are the main reason New Adult became a conversation at all – because we are technically too old for YA, but we are also too educated and too social justice-aware to give a shit about White Guys Writing Serious Literary Fiction, and we are too stuck in this damn recession to be fully fledged grownups in any financial or career sense (thanks, unpaid internships), and we were raised by a generation of parents who instilled a You Are Special value that is ruining our ability to be humble. So yeah, we Millennials may have “invented” New Adult out of our inability to grow up, but the forces that keep us from joining the club called “adulthood” was not made wholly by us, so shut up – we are staying diehard fans of whatever makes us wax nostalgic, and authors are responding with things like Jessica Darling’s It List ( IB ), Sisterhood Everlasting ( IB ), Sweet Valley Confidential ( IB ), The Summer Before (IB), Royal Wedding ( IB ), and From the Notebooks of a Middle School Princess ( IB ). (Jessica Darling, Traveling Pants, Baby-sitters Club, and Princess Diaries, respectively) Post-series followups with characters and prequels with teen characters as tweens are total candy for the True Fangirl, not real books that stand alone, and that’s awesome . Continue reading →

when you take a trope but color it

april reading in review

geographic diversity

blythewood is the new spence

march reading in review

« Apr

RSS - Posts

RSS - Comments

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,491 other followers

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.