Sunday, September 25, 2011

Nasty Reviews, Redux

I've just set a particularly mean review to publish on Tuesday morning -- in part so that I can, if I feel like it, look it over again tomorrow and perhaps tone it down before it actually publishes.

I doubt that I'll change it -- I read this particular book (why am I being so coy? It's Mira Grant's Feed, the second-least deserving Hugo nominee of this past year) well over a month ago, and I've been seething about it ever since, so it's unlikely another day will tone down my bile. But it does seem like an official cooling-off period is in order, just to be sure.

So there could have been a major post here today, but I postponed it for what might even be humanitarian purposes. You're welcome, I suppose.

(I think of this note as a coda to the three-year-old On Bad Reviews rather than as a tease to the upcoming post, though I've just realized that you folks reading this will probably take it as the latter. To make it up to you, I'll now reveal that the book I was talking about in that old post was Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist. You're welcome again.)

3 comments:

Dave Smith said...

Weird. I thought Feed was the clear winner on this year's ballot (before it lost, that is). Oh, how people's taste varies!

Anonymous said...

Feed is urban fantasy, so within its sub-genre, it stands out for not being awful and for having a genuine structural twist--not an original twist, as it's very similar to the one Goethe used in a famous novel in 1774--but a deviation from the norm nonetheless. So, you know, kudos on those grounds. But otherwise, wreck it.

Aren't you the one, though, who likes Carrie Vaughn's Kitty series? I'm not sure how I could go about slagging Feed and praising Kitty while remaining consistent. It seems more appropriate to say they are both not awful but still very weak.

Andrew Wheeler said...

Anonymous: Well, it's a good thing I'm not you, isn't it?

On your own blog, if you have one, you can be as consistent to whatever principles you espouse as you want to be. Here, I'm afraid, you're stuck with me.

And, FYI: Feed, which has a SFnal explanation and was published as SF, unfortunately has to be considered as SF. (Though it's clearly the work of someone much more comfortable in urban fantasy.)

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