Another again

[mrissa]

I suppose it's inevitable, if one reads in a genre or set of genres (because I don't really want to have that argument today), that one will have a big ol' set of "oh, no, not again" points. I just seem to run into them in clumps.

This time it was E. Rose Sabin's A School for Sorcery that had me smiting my forehead and wishing I could smite the author's forehead for her. It was another of those coming of age books where the adults deliberately make the kids miserable at school and don't intervene with massive huge interpersonal problems and/or evil actions, because "that's how you have to learn."

Well, I went to public high school in this country, thankyouverymuch, and I don't think that's how you have to learn, and what it teaches you is "don't trust people who claim they know what they're doing and have your best interests at heart, because they're stupid and vicious and full of it." Which is, don't get me wrong, a useful lesson in the world as it is. Possibly the most practical thing I learned in my pre-college schooling. But deliberately associating misery with knowledge or wisdom is not okay with me. Having this be the good system or the best system or the only system? No. Too many kids are getting that impression from their real lives; we certainly don't need to thump it further into them with fantasy novels.

Also, one of the big ethical breaches was using magic to decode a book of magic. Ummmm...authorlady? That's not the sort of thing that's intuitively obvious as an ethical breach, okay? You're going to need to show us why it's wrongety wrong wrong, because...it just looks natural to me. One of my characters jokes about getting a magic spy secret decoder ring, and another obliges him, and everybody's fine. So..."it's just evil, that's why"? Mm, nuh-uh.

Lame, lame, lame, and anti-recommended.

Now, of course, the author will google herself and find this, and I'll feel bad, but then on the other hand...just cut it out! Don't write books that do this stuff, and then we'll be fine!

Comments

[chance88088.livejournal.com]

Well, think of all the authors you might have saved from doing a similar stupid thing ... (ok, there's me.)

[songwind.livejournal.com]

One of my big annoyance points is "the main character has been the last scion of the royal house all along!" It can be well done (see Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn for example) but it's WAY overdone.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm generally not big on scions of royal houses in the first place, although they've popped up in some of my favorite books and series. But yes, when there is a Missing Prince(ss) or a Child Of Prophecy or a Secret Heir, my alarms start going off, and it takes some good writing to stop them.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

The reason it didn't bother me in MS&T was because there was really no "missing" prince, nor was there a prophecy or anything. Heck, his royal line had been deposed three dynasties (and nationalities) ago.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Regarding the evil adults at school, do you think Sabin wrote them that way because she thought that was how schools should be, or because she thought that was how schools are? If I were to write about a school, magic or not, and try to make it realistic, I would undoubtedly have almost all the adults be uncaring creeps, because at my high school, junior high, and grade school, they were. But I wouldn't portray that as a good thing...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, that wouldn't be as much of a hot button for me. Because yeah, that was my high school experience, too. But having the kid buying into it at the end; saying, oh yes, I understand now; joining the system happily...ick. Very Stockholm Syndrome in a way.