Neal Shusterman
Jul. 16th, 2011 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupI'm pretty convinced Neal Shusterman is a children's author out of laziness. Unwind is set in a world where abortion has been replaced by the option to donate all of you child's organs at 13. It features an attempted rape and the POV of a boy as his organ's are harvested, in such a way as to keep him alive for as long as possible. The Skinjacker's trilogy is comparatively mild in that it's merely about a limbo world populated by children who died but didn't make it all the way into the light, and one girl who wants to kill every living person and trap them there forever. But his writing style in general and sentence structures in particular are maddeningly simple. The internet says grades 6+ for Everlost and 7+ for Unwind, which at about two years younger than the ages of the protagonists sounds about right, but the book's style seems much too simple for them. It's like it has the strategy of an adult book but the tactics of an early reader.
I liked the first book of the SkinJacker trilogy, Everlost, quite a bit, and I'm not sure if my decreasing enjoyment of the last two is because my standards have changed or they're worse. But I do feel I'm on pretty solid ground criticizing its use of love as a crutch. It's a major pet peeve of mine when a book or movie says "they did it because they're in love", without showing the person falling in love, much less any reason for it. It's lazy, it's an attempt to add tension and motivation without putting the work in. And sometimes they say someone is in love with two different people with no motivation for either and I'm supposed to care about the problems it creates.
But it's extra bad in novels aimed at children, who are very actively forming the stories they tell about the world and don't have the data to fight bad ones. Sex, violence, and love are excellent things to put into kids books, provided they're modeled realistically- violence is not glorious and consequence free, sex isn't immediate and continuous ecstasy with no effort or expertise required, and love that is unconnected to the person you're in love with isn't really love. One of the villains is called out on falling in love with three different girls immediately upon meeting them for absolutely no reason, but the heroes' actions are no better motivated. I also think 12 is a little young to be reading sentences like "he held on to her because he could tell she didn't really want to escape", at least without some context*. Honestly, I'm uncomfortable having that much romance in a children's book in general. Even though the protagonists are 13-15, and some of them have been so for a very long time, Everlost is explicitly a children's world, and the simple narrative structure reinforces this. It just feels icky reading a fairly bondagey description of a boy tying up the most-recent-girl-he's-no-longer-in-love-with. What's worse, I can think of maybe one TV show that shows healthy people in healthy relationships practicing well negotiated BDSM**, but this faux-consensual "I could tell she really wanted it" is everywhere. Reprioritize, people.
And of course Shusterman suffers from the usual YA SFF problem of completely interchangeable protagonists. It makes the romance situation worse, but it's also pretty annoying in its own right. Is this an attempt to make the main characters ciphers for the reader? Because I can't think of another remotely plausible reason.
*I say this having read book with a really graphic depiction of the rape of a child when I was 12, Millennium, which had some fairly weird sexuality, at 10, and Stephen King at 13. Two of those at my dad's suggestion, although I sort of suspect he didn't remember some details. And that's just what I remember. It's not the content I'm objecting to, it's the way it's presented.
**And that's Bones, which means one participant is usually dead. My mom once said she liked Bones, but didn't like the way they portrayed casual sex, why couldn't they be more like Law and Order: Special Victim's Unit, which showed the consequences? By which she meant L+O's belief that if you engage in anything remotely nontraditional, you had it coming.
I liked the first book of the SkinJacker trilogy, Everlost, quite a bit, and I'm not sure if my decreasing enjoyment of the last two is because my standards have changed or they're worse. But I do feel I'm on pretty solid ground criticizing its use of love as a crutch. It's a major pet peeve of mine when a book or movie says "they did it because they're in love", without showing the person falling in love, much less any reason for it. It's lazy, it's an attempt to add tension and motivation without putting the work in. And sometimes they say someone is in love with two different people with no motivation for either and I'm supposed to care about the problems it creates.
But it's extra bad in novels aimed at children, who are very actively forming the stories they tell about the world and don't have the data to fight bad ones. Sex, violence, and love are excellent things to put into kids books, provided they're modeled realistically- violence is not glorious and consequence free, sex isn't immediate and continuous ecstasy with no effort or expertise required, and love that is unconnected to the person you're in love with isn't really love. One of the villains is called out on falling in love with three different girls immediately upon meeting them for absolutely no reason, but the heroes' actions are no better motivated. I also think 12 is a little young to be reading sentences like "he held on to her because he could tell she didn't really want to escape", at least without some context*. Honestly, I'm uncomfortable having that much romance in a children's book in general. Even though the protagonists are 13-15, and some of them have been so for a very long time, Everlost is explicitly a children's world, and the simple narrative structure reinforces this. It just feels icky reading a fairly bondagey description of a boy tying up the most-recent-girl-he's-no-longer-in-love-with. What's worse, I can think of maybe one TV show that shows healthy people in healthy relationships practicing well negotiated BDSM**, but this faux-consensual "I could tell she really wanted it" is everywhere. Reprioritize, people.
And of course Shusterman suffers from the usual YA SFF problem of completely interchangeable protagonists. It makes the romance situation worse, but it's also pretty annoying in its own right. Is this an attempt to make the main characters ciphers for the reader? Because I can't think of another remotely plausible reason.
*I say this having read book with a really graphic depiction of the rape of a child when I was 12, Millennium, which had some fairly weird sexuality, at 10, and Stephen King at 13. Two of those at my dad's suggestion, although I sort of suspect he didn't remember some details. And that's just what I remember. It's not the content I'm objecting to, it's the way it's presented.
**And that's Bones, which means one participant is usually dead. My mom once said she liked Bones, but didn't like the way they portrayed casual sex, why couldn't they be more like Law and Order: Special Victim's Unit, which showed the consequences? By which she meant L+O's belief that if you engage in anything remotely nontraditional, you had it coming.
