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Carping and criticising
Feb. 3rd, 2013 10:30 amI want to talk about Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan because it's really winding me up. I've just finished reading it, and I find it hard to understand why she wrote it like this. It's a YA novel set in a small town in the Cotswolds. The author is Irish, and she's writing about England. Why then is the book written in American? The characters slap their asses and talk about "buns of steel", they eat cookies and keep their mobile phones in their purses. Why? If Brennan wants to appeal to the American market, why not set it in a small town in America and have done with it?
All the girls have lived in this small English town for their whole lives, so it's a bit disconcerting to find that they and their families speak wholly American. The boys, Jared and his cousin Ash, have at least the excuse of having recently come here from the States.
The characters all go to the local school, and they appear to be mostly in the Lower Sixth (if people still call it that) apart from Jared, who is being forced to take GCSEs because his schooling is so behind. Clearly one reason why is that he regularly takes off from school to sulk and ride his motorbike. He never seems to have any discussion with his teachers about this habit, or indeed what subjects he can reasonably expect to take having been in the American system.
The rest of them are presumably doing A levels, except that they are terminally vague about what subjects they are actually studying. Oh, the girls go to English class, and some of them go to Political Science (is there actually a Political Science A-level or is this some form of general studies?) I wouldn't carp so much, except that at one point we are told that Kami wants to study hard and go to Cambridge to study journalism. She will be out of luck if she tries to apply to Cambridge University, as that isn't a subject that they offer, but perhaps she means to go to Anglia Ruskin. It's in any case academic as the amount of homework that she and her friends do (exactly none) will not get her through A-levels or into any university in the UK. And there's no discussion of how Kami or her family are going to pay for her university years.
Oh, well. I'm clearly not the target audience. But there were things that I enjoyed about it. The dialogue is snappy, the plot interesting, and the descriptions of the countryside have a concreteness and a charm that the school scenes lack. Am I wrong in asking for a degree of gritty realism comparable to say, Harry Potter or Buffy?
All the girls have lived in this small English town for their whole lives, so it's a bit disconcerting to find that they and their families speak wholly American. The boys, Jared and his cousin Ash, have at least the excuse of having recently come here from the States.
The characters all go to the local school, and they appear to be mostly in the Lower Sixth (if people still call it that) apart from Jared, who is being forced to take GCSEs because his schooling is so behind. Clearly one reason why is that he regularly takes off from school to sulk and ride his motorbike. He never seems to have any discussion with his teachers about this habit, or indeed what subjects he can reasonably expect to take having been in the American system.
The rest of them are presumably doing A levels, except that they are terminally vague about what subjects they are actually studying. Oh, the girls go to English class, and some of them go to Political Science (is there actually a Political Science A-level or is this some form of general studies?) I wouldn't carp so much, except that at one point we are told that Kami wants to study hard and go to Cambridge to study journalism. She will be out of luck if she tries to apply to Cambridge University, as that isn't a subject that they offer, but perhaps she means to go to Anglia Ruskin. It's in any case academic as the amount of homework that she and her friends do (exactly none) will not get her through A-levels or into any university in the UK. And there's no discussion of how Kami or her family are going to pay for her university years.
Oh, well. I'm clearly not the target audience. But there were things that I enjoyed about it. The dialogue is snappy, the plot interesting, and the descriptions of the countryside have a concreteness and a charm that the school scenes lack. Am I wrong in asking for a degree of gritty realism comparable to say, Harry Potter or Buffy?
