I've I'd known this book was gratuitiously set in a ritzy private school

[conuly]

I would not have wasted my time.

Not that there aren't interesting things you can do with that setting, but in this case the author clearly just set her book there to be more interesting and here's the thing: you can't fix writing problems by changing the setting.

And there were a LOT of writing problems. The nicest thing I can say about this book is just that it was boring, but it was also muddled. I feel sufficiently scathing about it that I actually feel bad, because the writing wasn't so offensive as to merit that level of flaming, it was just ordinary bad, so I won't name names, but instead turn back to this advice - you can't fix major structural issues in your writing just by moving the action somewhere else, and you can't make a boring story less boring that way either.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

Oh boy. And this got published?

I swear, they're just signing anyone up who wants to write YA.

[conuly]

If this had been YA then at least we can expect some of the action to have been scandalous. No, it was middle grade.

I think the problem is that the author should've decided from the start do so something slice-of-life. That works out pretty well for middle grade realistic fiction. But no, she kept trying to introduce plot points, and then she'd just... drop them. Even the two that resolved at the end did so in a really unsatisfying way.

[wpadmirer]

You know, middle graders can handle an actual story. This writer should have that pointed out to her.

[conuly]

Any one of the weirdly raised and dropped plot points would've made a story on its own, if she'd just developed them properly.

Like, from the very start our protagonist is being exiled from her friends for being too honest and not letting them pass tests by cheating or win games by accidentally cheating. Okay, that's a potential story there.

But then right away her mother is "Yo, time to go to Hong Kong for my big promotion!" and then she pretty much doesn't think about her past friends OR the crisis that caused the rift again until the end of the book. At no point does cheating even come up again, at least not in any context that remotely connects to her. Now her new problem is that she speaks without thinking, and her new friends suggest she stop doing that, so she tries it and it works, huzzah.

Then it's all "Being half-Chinese is haaaaaard" - but at her new private school actually she's one of several, so not so much.

There's no real culture shock, even the lessons are taught in English. She thought she'd miss her grandma, but she doesn't think of her again once the plane lands.

All her classmates are nice enough, but there's one girl who is intermittantly mean. Okay, that's a plot point, and a classic one, great! But every time she's mean her parents, teachers, and friends all come down hard on her for being a total bitch, and near the end of the book she confesses she has an unhappy home life and... that's that, no hard feelings whatsoever.

The protagonist's mother changes over the flight from a normal enough mother to one who is obsessed with how her kids make her look, but then the protagonist says "Mom, that bugs me" and her mom goes "You're right, I'll stop" and... I guess she just stops. The change, btw, comes exactly as out of nowhere for the reader as for the protagonist, so....

And then at the end she calls her friends from home and has a nice chat where nobody talks about the big fight at all. WTF.

Any one of these could've been a story! Or we could've done slice-of-life without attempting Big Character and Plot Motion, but even then, things have to resolve in some satisfactory way, or else they have to be left unresolved in a way that makes it obvious that you did it on purpose rather than that you forgot you were writing about it.

[wpadmirer]

Holy Crap. That book sounds like a damn mess.

[conuly]

It needed some serious revision before going to print, that's for sure.

This isn't the first time I've encountered a middle grade novel that's gratuitously set at a ritzy private school because the story isn't very interesting, but as I've said, most of those are just forgettable and boring. This one is muddled, which is a real crime.

[chez_jae]

Flame away!

:D

[conuly]

It really doesn't deserve *quite* the disparagement I feel for it.

I mean, all my criticisms are valid - and there's more I haven't even said! - but if it wasn't for the outre setting I would just roll my eyes and forget about it. But that setting! It's so obviously wallpaper over subpar writing that should never have been published, and then she doesn't even do anything with it! Like, nothing interesting accrues from either the move to Hong Kong or the fact that the protagonist has gone from being ordinary well-off (or at least upper middle class, although she probably thinks of her family income and wealth as average) to "ensconced in the lifestyles of the rich and famous". Nothing, so what the hell is the point?