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Heeee.
I have sort of a love-hate relationship with Nancy Springer's books. As in, I either love them or I hate them. In fact, I've sometimes wondered if there could conceivably be more than one author writing under that name, because it's a weird Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. I never really know what I'm going to get when I pick up one of her books; it'll either be awesome or it'll make me want to throw it across the room, but I'm never sure which.
Anyway, I picked up one of her young-adult books at the library that made me giggle and squee: "The Friendship Song". It's just about the coolest example of "write what you know" that I've ever seen, because she is CLEARLY writing from personal teenage-girl experience in this book, she's got to be. And I could relate to it so strongly -- yet the idea of writing about this particular aspect of myself never occurred to me. It's just not something that I would have thought you COULD successfully write a book about. And then she did.
It is, I kid you not, a book about a couple of teenage fangirls who crush on h/c and male friendships. It's hilarious and so damn accurate -- I was alternating between laughing and cringing, because it's written with an adult sensibility and so you can pretty clearly see what the female protagonists don't see, as they concoct ever-more-fanciful and romantic illusions about the (largely imagined) best-friends-till-the-end-of-the-world relationship between the guys in their favorite band. It's an interesting mix of genuine teen-girl fantasy -- as the girls realize that the boy band in question is in actual danger from a supernatural entity that only they can see -- and an adult deconstruction of the real-world implications of that particular fantasy. Probably the crux of the book for an SGA fan like me -- I think I'll put this under a cut; it's a mid-level spoiler, not a "and then they all died" caliber spoiler, but it *is* kind of a pivotal scene in the book ...
( Cut for spoiler )
This barely scratches the surface ... there is just a LOT in the book that I could really relate to on a teenage-girl level, and a lot of ideas that are just cool all by themselves. It's basically a fans'-eye-view of being a fan, and not just any fan, but a fan like me. It's short and it *is* written for a middle-school reading level, and certain aspects of the ending in particular were unsatisfying to me, but still a very fun book for all of that.
I have sort of a love-hate relationship with Nancy Springer's books. As in, I either love them or I hate them. In fact, I've sometimes wondered if there could conceivably be more than one author writing under that name, because it's a weird Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. I never really know what I'm going to get when I pick up one of her books; it'll either be awesome or it'll make me want to throw it across the room, but I'm never sure which.
Anyway, I picked up one of her young-adult books at the library that made me giggle and squee: "The Friendship Song". It's just about the coolest example of "write what you know" that I've ever seen, because she is CLEARLY writing from personal teenage-girl experience in this book, she's got to be. And I could relate to it so strongly -- yet the idea of writing about this particular aspect of myself never occurred to me. It's just not something that I would have thought you COULD successfully write a book about. And then she did.
It is, I kid you not, a book about a couple of teenage fangirls who crush on h/c and male friendships. It's hilarious and so damn accurate -- I was alternating between laughing and cringing, because it's written with an adult sensibility and so you can pretty clearly see what the female protagonists don't see, as they concoct ever-more-fanciful and romantic illusions about the (largely imagined) best-friends-till-the-end-of-the-world relationship between the guys in their favorite band. It's an interesting mix of genuine teen-girl fantasy -- as the girls realize that the boy band in question is in actual danger from a supernatural entity that only they can see -- and an adult deconstruction of the real-world implications of that particular fantasy. Probably the crux of the book for an SGA fan like me -- I think I'll put this under a cut; it's a mid-level spoiler, not a "and then they all died" caliber spoiler, but it *is* kind of a pivotal scene in the book ...
( Cut for spoiler )
This barely scratches the surface ... there is just a LOT in the book that I could really relate to on a teenage-girl level, and a lot of ideas that are just cool all by themselves. It's basically a fans'-eye-view of being a fan, and not just any fan, but a fan like me. It's short and it *is* written for a middle-school reading level, and certain aspects of the ending in particular were unsatisfying to me, but still a very fun book for all of that.