Clarion Reading: The Spiderwick Chronicles: Book 1
I read through the first book of Holly Black’s THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES on the subway yesterday. Good fun. It’s middle-grade, very short. It’s cute — reminds me of The Borrowers and the early chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Likable protagonists with clear personalities, economy of language. I was sad when it was over, wishing we got more depth into the characters and the mysterious world the children start to uncover at the end. Actually, it felt a lot like a TV pilot. Ms. Black’s novel TITHE is in the mail. I look forward to reading her adult writing style. You can tell a lot about a writer from how they change style between adult fiction and YA. I’ve been reading Elizabeth Hand’s Boba Fett series, which is middle grade, when I’m at B&N after work, and I started on her collection “Saffron and Brimstone” (awesome, btw). But more about that in a different post.
For close to a year I’ve been kicking around an idea with the working title “The Princess Detective” about a young lass who is heiress to a medieval kingdom and a brilliant crime solver in her ample spare time. I have a loose outline of the first book (it will probably be a middle-grade series, 100-150 pages each), but I need someone to help me hammer out the details. I want to set the series in the world of Torchpunk, a term I created over the summer. I see it as a fantastic world where wood-burning ovens power everything from horseless carriages to wooden fighter planes to giant mechas crafted from oak and stone. There are sling-guns and triple-swords and parachutes for wild castle raids.
Yikes, gotta stop daydreaming out loud, or the next time I go looking through the YA books I’ll spot “Handmaiden Mysteries.”
Actually Tithe is also sold as YA but it reads like adult fiction to me, even though it concerns a teenager and teenage sorts of problems/emotions.
Thanks for the point. I think this is my first official blog blunder. I’m looking forward to Tithe either way. Most of my all-time favorites are YA, and a lot of them read like standard adult fiction. I discovered recently that YA is supposed to cater to readers 14-18. That’s funny to me. I thought high schoolers were supposed to just read “books.”
hey i love the spiderwicks book da is bout all i read
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