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A review by opheliabedilia
Growing Up Dead in Texas by Stephen Graham Jones
2.0
I almost hated this book. A friend said it's like ADD in print, and that's true, but it's worse than that.
1. A hint to writers: if you're going to make your narrator a professional writer, he needs to be able to write. With sentences and coherent thoughts and those kinds of things. For an example of how this is done, see Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. If your narrator is going to write with ridiculous sentence fragments and no sense of plot or timing or anything useful, say he's anything but a professional writer.
2. Um, what? What just happened? What time are you recalling now? Who the heck is this person? Where are we... Wait now we're here? With whom? And what year are you suddenly telling me about? What the hell did that last sentence mean? These were my thoughts during the first chapter. And all 10 chapters that followed. Repeat what I just wrote 100 times in your head and you've experienced reading this book. I don't think I've ever actually rolled my eyes while reading. Before this.
3. I read all 250 pages, and I have only some idea what happened. I was counting on it coming clear at the end. Which was silly, given that nothing is clear ever in the rest of the book. I admit that I'm not always the most astute reader, and rarely the first to figure out the culprit in a mystery. But I am intelligent enough that I usually know what happened after I've read the whole thing, for goodness sake.
The author is good at one thing, which is creating a place. Rural Texas was essentially one of the characters in this book, and possibly the only well written one.
1. A hint to writers: if you're going to make your narrator a professional writer, he needs to be able to write. With sentences and coherent thoughts and those kinds of things. For an example of how this is done, see Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. If your narrator is going to write with ridiculous sentence fragments and no sense of plot or timing or anything useful, say he's anything but a professional writer.
2. Um, what? What just happened? What time are you recalling now? Who the heck is this person? Where are we... Wait now we're here? With whom? And what year are you suddenly telling me about? What the hell did that last sentence mean? These were my thoughts during the first chapter. And all 10 chapters that followed. Repeat what I just wrote 100 times in your head and you've experienced reading this book. I don't think I've ever actually rolled my eyes while reading. Before this.
3. I read all 250 pages, and I have only some idea what happened. I was counting on it coming clear at the end. Which was silly, given that nothing is clear ever in the rest of the book. I admit that I'm not always the most astute reader, and rarely the first to figure out the culprit in a mystery. But I am intelligent enough that I usually know what happened after I've read the whole thing, for goodness sake.
The author is good at one thing, which is creating a place. Rural Texas was essentially one of the characters in this book, and possibly the only well written one.