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Kasan posted:I actually loved Ready Player One. The 80's is what I grew up with and reading the book was an extremely nostalgic experience for me. The story itself might have lacked somewhat overall (certainly it wasn't a 5 star novel), but it was well written, and didn't ramble through out. Waffle Ho posted:Oh, you had to get me started. Also, every time somebody discusses this 50 Shades of Grey nonsense like it has any merit at all, I die a little inside.
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May 13, 2012 01:09
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Which books do you folks believe is best for teaching freshmen level American students in a conservative area but college-bound targeted students?
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May 13, 2012 21:42
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Dead Man Posting posted:Which books do you folks believe is best for teaching freshmen level American students in a conservative area but college-bound targeted students? Are we talking like... what, 10th or 11th grade? I would definitely nominate The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I posted a short review a bit ago - it's a very poignant book, and maybe the students can take more from it since they're on a higher-education track. I do know a lot of teachers do The Hunger Games, as well.
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May 13, 2012 21:50
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Yes. I made a list of books that I could use in any English classroom for various grade levels. Particularly, I am trying to find books that are motivating for students to read (who the hell wants to read Romeo and Juliet). It's subjective without choice, yes, but some books are naturally easier to inspire students to read than others. Here is my list so far (some may or may not be YA): Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins Boy Meets Boy by David Lethivan [Undecided: Contains sexual content, may not appeal to all students] Wintergirls by Laurie Anderston [Undecided: About anorexia, may not appeal to all students] Provost’s Dog by Tamora Pierce Watership Down by Richard Adams We by Yevgeny Zamyatin [Undecided: questionable appropriate content] The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness Miss Peregrineäs Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs Maze Runner by James Dashner Unwind by Neal Shusterman Railsea by China Mievelle [Undecided: Not out yet, haven’t read it] Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Delirium by Lauren Oliver The Book Thief by Markus Zusak The Old Kingdom by Garth Nix Stay Safe fucked around with this message at 22:09 on May 13, 2012 |
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May 13, 2012 22:02
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'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a great book - I don't think the content is too questionable, honestly. I mean.. hell in 11th grade they had us reading Great Gatsby and that was full of boozing and sex and crazyness. Also, if you're doing that one it might be cool to follow it with "A Brave New World" by Huxley - it's a different take on the same theme, and both books are the roots for Orwell's "1984" to the point where Orwell even admitted nearly plagiarizing.  I'm not sure how appealing that might be to younger people, but I found both books quite enthralling. Anyway, that's not YA, so back on track! I see you do have a bunch of the ones that were offered up in the thread here, which is pretty awesome. I know for sure that Unwind is taught, even though it's somewhat questionable subject matter (abortion/right to life) - I actually saw a while back on Youtube a video made by a highschool class where they literally made the WHOLE BOOK into a home-made movie. It was kinda  but at the same time, it was awesome that they all enjoyed it so much that they put that much effort into it.If you're on GoodReads, there's actually an awesome group for Literary teachers - YA Reads for Teachers. Their group bookshelf will probably have a ton more ideas for you! That Damn Satyr fucked around with this message at 22:19 on May 13, 2012 |
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May 13, 2012 22:13
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I'm surprised you haven't selected The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. As far as I'm aware, that was the book that was considered the genre definer for young adult. Tho I admit I haven't read the story since I was in high school myself. If you wanted to look at some classics, there is always the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. Or did I miss the point, and you're looking for more modern examples of YA that would be easier for high schoolers to identify with. (since I don't think what I enjoyed in high school are what modern kids do)
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May 13, 2012 22:45
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Kasan posted:I'm surprised you haven't selected The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. As far as I'm aware, that was the book that was considered the genre definer for young adult. Tho I admit I haven't read the story since I was in high school myself. I think all the books you listed are aimed at much, much younger children than what he's searching for, as well as what this thread is about. Hardy Boys is definitely children's / tween at best, and the same for Nancy Drew. 10th+ graders are not dumb children, and I'm sure would be bored to death with something as simple as that. As for Catcher, I don't know what the current norm is, but I was taught that in 7th or 8th grade... But I do remember being a bit  about it at the time, for what that's worth.
That Damn Satyr fucked around with this message at 22:54 on May 13, 2012 |
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May 13, 2012 22:49
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John Green's Looking For Alaska is pretty great, and I enjoyed Julie Anne Peters' Luna. Both of those are pretty controversial though (the first deals with a lot of teenage drinking, drugs, sex, death, etc., and the latter deals with transgender issues). As far as We goes, I don't know if I'd really encourage teaching that to high schoolers. It's a fantastic book, but it can be a little disorienting even for adult readers in places.
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May 13, 2012 23:29
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It's interesting to reflect on the YA literature that I've persistently loved over the years since they're almost overwhelmingly fantasy novels, as opposed to mystery or what have you. This is definitely not the case for non-YA fiction! A Wrinkle in Time Madeline L'Engle- a time travel tale that introduced me to 'tesseracts' His Dark Materials Philip Pullman- a fantastic fantasy trilogy about ill-destined love and religion The Giver Lois Lowry- the story of a boy in a utopia whose people receive life assignments (probably fair to call this a dystopia) among others Honestly, if I had to choose only a scant few YA books to which future societies have access, I'd probably choose the list above, with Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, and the first Hunger Games book (the first was so powerful, but the others? ... not so much) thrown in. Two additional non-fantasy books I also enjoyed are Lois Lowry's Number the Stars and Eli Wiesel's Night, both Holocaust stories. While I haven't read either since middle school, my teachers almost overwhelmingly assigned Holocaust novels, and these were the two that really stuck with me. Maybe I'd think differently now, but I would love to re-read them. sighnoceros posted:
It's also been a number of year since I read this book, but when I did, I loved the hell out of it. It brought me to a startling intense amount of tears. Perhaps I'd feel differently now, but I found Connolly's particular take on retelling fairy tales was novel and engrossing.
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May 17, 2012 01:19
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Ray Bradbury was always a favorite read in my 7-8 grade class so there's that. Maybe The Odyssey or The Iliad?
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May 17, 2012 02:43
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I would recommend Feed by M.T. Anderson, myself. Maybe you and the class could discuss how technology affects our modern lives/future generations.
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May 18, 2012 02:55
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Would 1984 be too advanced? I'm a whore for dystopian literature, so I think it'd fit in well with Hunger Games as a compare/contrast sort of thing (Fahrenheit 451 too, obviously).
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May 18, 2012 04:00
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The Chaos Walking series is loving amazing and all of you except the OP are doing yourselves a disservice by not reading it. 
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May 18, 2012 04:11
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ungulateman posted:The Chaos Walking series is loving amazing and all of you except the OP are doing yourselves a disservice by not reading it. Yessssssssssss. Except, I have to admit I kind-of hated the ambiguity of the ending. If you didn't know, the author also released a (very short) story for free as a sort-of prequel thing for them called The New World (Amazon - Goodreads) that covers Viola before she arrived on the planet. Also, as Danger posted earlier in the thread, Lionsgate has announced that Charlie Kaufman is going to be adapting the films, so with luck that will draw a lot more attention to the series. I've actually got another Ness book in my 'to read' queue: A Monster Calls. I've heard quite good things about it, but no one I actually know has read it so I've not gotten any first-hand accounts.
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May 18, 2012 05:07
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Has anyone tried The Uglies Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. I have a teenage cousin in Maine who loved these and I want to see if they are really worth it.
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May 18, 2012 21:06
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The first book is okay, but then it starts go downhill really fast by the end of book two. The fourth book in the Uglies series doesn't feature the main character from the first three books. I would recommend reading the first book as a standalone and leaving the other three alone.
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May 18, 2012 21:55
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PT6A posted:Would 1984 be too advanced? I'm a whore for dystopian literature, so I think it'd fit in well with Hunger Games as a compare/contrast sort of thing (Fahrenheit 451 too, obviously). I don't know, 1984 is a dark, dark book. Compare the ending of Hunger Games, which was considered dark and depressing, to 1984. Maybe late high school, but definitely not middle school. Fahrenheit 451 seems like a much better choice for the tween audience.
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May 19, 2012 03:19
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That drat Satyr posted:I've actually got another Ness book in my 'to read' queue: A Monster Calls. I've heard quite good things about it, but no one I actually know has read it so I've not gotten any first-hand accounts. A Monster Calls was brilliant. When I was working in a High School Library, we got a copy in. It looked intriguing, so I took a closer look. Three pages in, I went straight to Amazon and bought a copy. One of my favourite YA books ever.
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May 27, 2012 21:51
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Aside from being an original and wonderful story (it's obvious it's going to be an allegory, but part of the fun is guessing what allegory it will be) A Monster Calls is one of those books that's just beautifully produced. The illustrations really add a lot to the story. No love for Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series?  The central conceit of the series is that cities have transformed themselves into moving vehicles that rampage across the landscape eating each other, turning Europe into a muddy wasteland, but beyond that elevator pitch it's an incredibly diverse and fascinating world, with underwater cities and Tibetan mountain fortresses and Saharan scavenger ships. Big, bold, swashbuckling adventure novels with excellent characters and serious themes, especially towards the end of the series. Exactly the kind of fantastic adventures stories you'd read under the covers with a flashlight as a kid, to use a cliche I don't think anybody ever actually did. And although Reeve now has some sort of Atwoodian aversion to an element of what he originally wrote - he hates the airship-infestation of steampunk and refuses to include them in anything he writes now - Mortal Engines really does have a good reason for including them, and does it really, really well.
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May 28, 2012 05:34
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The Book Thief is great, for the poster who was wondering--it's a novel about the Holocaust without being a Holocaust Novel, if you know what I mean. I actually loved Zusak's earlier book, I Am the Messenger, even more, but that seems to be a hate-it-or-love-it type deal. Most people are more into The Book Thief, so I would start with that. I'm also obsessed with John Green. If you're into contemporary, "realistic" fiction then I don't think you can do better. Apparently I'm just a contrarian, because The Fault in Our Stars got a ton of great buzz earlier this year, even from people who don't normally read YA, but I thought it was a little weaker than his previous efforts. I like that he's stepping outside of his usual subject matter a bit, though, and I think it's a good omen for his future writing. One caveat: his books do tend to contain a handful of repetitive tropes, so I wouldn't read them all at once--I put about six months between them when I was reading them for the first time, and they don't seem as formulaic that way. I'm also pretty obsessed with The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart, which is about a girl aiming to take down the male-only secret society at her boarding school. M.T. Anderson was also writing some interesting stuff a few years ago (not sure what he's up to now)--Feed was about a dystopian society where all kids are implanted with a computer chip in their brains at birth, so that they can communicate with each other/be advertised to/be exposed to propaganda/etc. all inside their heads. It basically explores the main character's relationship with a girl whose computer chip is malfunctioning and the awakening he has about his life/society/the chips in general from that experience. The slang used can be off-putting for some readers, but you gotta just power through because it's so worth it. This was one of the books that really kicked off the current dystopian wave, I think. His Octavian Nothing books are really interesting too--they're about an African-American boy growing up in a house full of scientists and educators in colonial-era Boston, and he gradually uncovers secrets about his upbringing. It's a really cool mix of realistic historical fiction with just a splash of fantasy. (It has a fantasy vibe without actually being fantastic in any way.) I really loved these books because they explored some aspects of colonial history that aren't usually depicted in YA novels. I'm kind of over the dystopian/paranormal trends. I'll read the good stuff, but the market's just been flooded by bad rip-offs lately, making the good stuff that much harder to find. Anybody have any recommendations for good plain ol' realistic fiction?
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May 29, 2012 05:42
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freebooter posted:No love for Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series? The Mortal Engines series (Or the Hungry City Chronicles or the Predator Cities Quartet or whatever they're calling them now) are my absolute favourite YA books of all time. I recommended them to everyone I could back at the library, and everyone who picked them up loved them- and that includes a fair number of teachers, too. The prequel series, starting with Fever Crumb is just as good as the originals. I checked the other day, and learned that the first book was published over 10 years ago. I figure it's about time for a re-read. And Philip Reeve is a really nice guy, too.
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May 30, 2012 05:14
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Echoing the John Green love. I love his work and think that TFIOS is his best, but I have to agree that some of his stories and characters are strangely derivative of those from his other books -- "Paper Towns" and "Looking for Alaska" are like bizarro companion pieces, they're so similar. Any opinions on "13 Reasons Why"? I know that it was a sensation of sorts, and while practically every YA without dystopian future or paranormal romance must be about teen suicide, I'm curious. Some reviews say that the narrator is a real whiner, though, and since the author's follow-up (The Future of Us) got such mediocre reviews, I'm skeptical. tvb fucked around with this message at 07:52 on May 30, 2012 |
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May 30, 2012 07:50
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freebooter posted:Aside from being an original and wonderful story (it's obvious it's going to be an allegory, but part of the fun is guessing what allegory it will be). This is what my friend kept telling me, and how it was a big deal to not have anything spoiled. The book gave everything away though within the first 10 or 15 pages so I don't really get what the big deal is.
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May 31, 2012 07:41
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Can I reccomend the Gone Series? It's written by someone who (co-)wrote Animorphs. It's incredibly dark and has been described as Stephen King meets Lord of the Flies meets X-Men. The basic premise is that everybody over the age of 14 in a Californian town suddenly vanishes, and that an impenetrable barrier surrounds a 10 mile radius, cutting the kids off from society. And also there are super powers.
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May 31, 2012 19:37
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tvb posted:Echoing the John Green love. I love his work and think that TFIOS is his best, but I have to agree that some of his stories and characters are strangely derivative of those from his other books -- "Paper Towns" and "Looking for Alaska" are like bizarro companion pieces, they're so similar. The impression I get is this: Looking for Alaska is supposedly pretty autobiographical (Green denies this and/or tries to avoid questions about it, but I've read a couple comments online from people who allegedly went to school with him who say a lot of the things that happened in the book happened very similarly in real life). So when he got some (well-deserved) poo poo for making Alaska such a manic-pixie dream girl, I think he took it a little personally because the book was so autobiographical . . . and he started writing Paper Towns in order to "deconstruct" the concept of a real-life manic-pixie dream girl and how wrong it is to view the people in our lives as just supporting players designed to provide meaning to our empty lives or whatever. In that respect, I think the two books do work as bookends--Alaska is definitely an MPDG, partially due to the limitations of the plot, and Margo pretty much smashes the entire concept into a bunch of pieces. But aside from that difference, there are so many plot similarities between the two books . . . it just seems like he could have pushed himself to come up with something a little different. Paper Towns is actually a phenomenal book when it's read it on its own, but when you read it after Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines, it just seems really derivative (MPDGs, road trips, pranks, et cetera). But The Fault in Our Stars does make it seem like he's stepping out of his comfort zone more and more, which is great.
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May 31, 2012 21:40
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 One of the YA authors I liked is Emily Rodda, with my favourite series (also the one I read completely) being Rowan of Rin. First time I went to Melbourne I bought the Journey, basically the anthology containing all 5 books in the series. The main character is Rowan, a weak young shepherd for special animals called the Buckshah. He lived in a village filled with strong people, so he's unique amongst his people. The premises for each of the novels is basically Rowan, led by a prophecy given by a cranky old woman, adventuring outside his small village and do something, like saving his village from drought or being a judge for a marriage. She also did Deltora Quest, but I found it rather mediocre. An unrelated question: Is it normal for a man to release books almost monthly? I stumbled across a row full of these books in Kinokuniya and I cannot believe anyone writes that fast.
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Jun 2, 2012 04:56
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Deltora Quest is awesome too, y'know Rowan of Rin is indeed a good series, though.
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Jun 2, 2012 09:09
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cptn_dr posted:The Mortal Engines series (Or the Hungry City Chronicles or the Predator Cities Quartet or whatever they're calling them now) are my absolute favourite YA books of all time. I recommended them to everyone I could back at the library, and everyone who picked them up loved them- and that includes a fair number of teachers, too. The prequel series, starting with Fever Crumb is just as good as the originals.
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Jun 4, 2012 21:10
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Goons love Terry Pratchett. Goons love YA. So what could be better than Terry Pratchett writing YA? NOTHING. NOTHING IS BETTER THAN THAT. First up, the "Nome Trilogy" or "The Bromeliad": Truckers, Diggers and Wings.    The trilogy tells the story of the struggles of a group of tiny people who live among us, first under the floor of a department store which they believe to be the whole world, later in an abandoned quarry. I'll go on record right now: I loving love these books. They are the nearest thing to perfect I can think of and I revisit them as often as I can get away with without burning out on them. In Pratchett's usual style they are very funny books but without losing sight of what is important, for short, funny kids books these things are goddamned profound. They touch on some really deep themes of faith, power and belief, the struggle against a hostile or worse, indifferent world, the hope for a better future, the limitations of existence and the breaking of those limits. And they convey 90% of this beautiful profound meaning through the time honoured medium of bickering. I don't mean witty banter with carefully crafted one liners and artificial punchlines, I mean the proper "people can be dumb and stubborn but generally are just people" verbal meandering that no one can do as well as Pratchett. The humour never overpowers the real drama and risk of being 4 inches tall in a big and frightening world, but similarly the humour is never lost in the sheer desperation of it all, the balance is a wonder to behold in all three books. They're not long books, the entire trilogy could be polished off in a day or so and the individual books inside a couple of hours. If you've ever read and enjoyed anything he's ever written you could do a lot worse than seeking these books out.
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Jun 4, 2012 23:41
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Dr.Spaceman posted:Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi is a great dystopian YA novel set after a hard fall from a pre-peak oil industrialized society. The main character is a ship breaker who works cutting up old oil tankers for scrap steal, copper, and oil. It's a pretty fast paced book with scary action. Very well paced and written. Great book, check out his adult SF (one novel and a good sized handful of short stories) too, there's some samples on his website http://windupstories.com/stories/ (warning, the stories linked on the site are depressing as all gently caress). Also, the sequal/companion to Shipbreaker, The Drowned Cities came out last month.
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Jun 4, 2012 23:51
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toanoradian posted:An unrelated question: Is it normal for a man to release books almost monthly? I stumbled across a row full of these books in Kinokuniya and I cannot believe anyone writes that fast. It's possible for someone to write a book a month if the manuscripts aren't particularly long, but it's much more likely that this series has multiple people writing under one name. The billed author's name -- Adam Blade -- just screams packaged series pen name.
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Jun 5, 2012 06:15
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Hef Deezy posted:It's possible for someone to write a book a month if the manuscripts aren't particularly long, but it's much more likely that this series has multiple people writing under one name. The billed author's name -- Adam Blade -- just screams packaged series pen name. A lot of YA serials are ghostwritten - look at series like Animorphs, Spooksville, Goosebumps et all from the 90's - there was a book out a month for years straight. It's a bit doubly suspicious as it doesn't seem the author has a Wikipedia page with a biography on it, and searching for his name just gives a few webpages with some canned facts. Edit: Actually, I could be wrong about Goosebumps and Spooksville, I can't seem to find any information about those - but Animorphs was for sure ghostwritten with the most terrible, formulaic outline possible. That Damn Satyr fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jun 5, 2012 |
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Jun 5, 2012 20:21
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Goosebumps, and most of R.L. Stine's books, were indeed ghostwritten. His wife is VP of a book packager called Parachute Press which produced all the Goosebumps & Fear Street books and spinoffs. At some points they had like 4 books released in a month with the R.L. Stine brand name on it, which is not even remotely possible for one man to produce. By the way, I'm actually a YA author myself and in fact got my start outlining for another of the Animorphs authors' series, so it's interesting you bring it up. I'm very, very familiar with the whole Animorphs ghostwriting operation and actually have a bunch of those outlines somewhere. You'd be surprised how different some of those were from outline to book. The quality of a finished book really came down to the ghostwriter -- some elevated the outlines and others really, really did not. There were a couple books that had so much potential in outline form that were executed horribly. And some, like the random "Cassie is lost in Australia!" book, that massively improved on the outline. Children's publishing is shady and we lie to kids constantly. I've found it's best to just keep the seedy underbelly secret and let folks go on believing that a woman named Carolyn Keene is like 132-years-old and still cranking out Nancy Drew books. EDIT: \/\/ Don't worry, Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket is very real! And yeah, Harry Potter sort of moved us away from a monthly/bimonthly paperback series model to longer novels released many months apart. I'm sure there are probably some relatively successful mass market paperback series in the mid-grade market still (which is what Animorphs etc. were, they're not technically YA), but the heyday of series like Baby-Sitters Club, Goosebumps, etc. is over for now. Hef Deezy fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jun 5, 2012 |
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Jun 5, 2012 21:48
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Lemony Snickett is forever on the run and in fear for his life, and nothing you say will change my opinion on this. In all seriousness, though - that's actually pretty awesome, because boy were some of those Animorphs books horrendous. I won't lie, I read them religiously as a youngster and a few years ago I tried to go back and give them another go for nostalgia's sake and I just couldn't do it. I think it's kind-of interesting to see the sort of books that were popular for YA in the mid-90's contrasted with the things that are popular for YA now, like Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. Honestly I thought serialization was kind-of dead, but I guess Beast Quest is doing alright for itself.
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Jun 5, 2012 22:27
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Hef Deezy posted:And some, like the random "Cassie is lost in Australia!" book, that massively improved on the outline. God, I hated that one. That was the one that convinced me, even as a 13-year-old, that they were just pulling poo poo out of their rear end and they were never going to finish the series and I stopped buying the books. Then the very next book started the end-of-series arc, which I didn't read until I read the whole series again when I was 19. And I don't care what anyone says, it has black spots, but the series as a whole is still great.
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Jun 7, 2012 03:59
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That Cassie book really was one of the most out-of-their-asses plots, up there with the whole Atlantis thing in I think #36. Thing about the Australia book is that the outline literally stopped in the middle to say "and now we need like 75 pages to fill, so research Australia and do whatever you want," so I think the ghostwriter (Lisa Harkrader) ultimately did a pretty good job considering what she was given to work with. Not that it was an especially good book otherwise. Anyway, I do agree that Animorphs as a whole was really great, and the co-creators -- Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant (they're married) -- remain two of my favorite people/authors. Michael has his (twisted and bizarre) YA series GONE and BZRK as well as a mid-grade series called The Magnificent 12, all of which are well worth reading if you liked the darker & creepier aspects of the K.A. Applegate books. Katherine has stuck to younger fare, and her latest is called The One and Only Ivan, which is based on the true story of a gorilla that was held on display in a mall in Tacoma, WA. It's gotten great reviews. The two of them have actually teamed up again for a new book called EVE AND ADAM that should be out in October. I gather it's a sci-fi satire, and I think it'll be one for YA fans to look out for considering their other work. Here's the GoodReads page for it: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13493463-eve-and-adam Since this is a thread for recommendations, I haven't seen this one mentioned yet: The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith. It's deeply disturbing and very psychological and I loved it. So many people think YA is nothing but paranormal romances and dystopian romances these days, but there are actually a ton of really great books coming out that just don't get nearly the same amount of press.
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Jun 7, 2012 05:31
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Hef Deezy posted:EDIT: \/\/ Don't worry, Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket is very real! Oh, yes I know he is. My internet sarcasm isn't very good sometimes. Actually - on the note of him, I've had his book The Basic Eight on my 'to-read' list for a while. I'm not certain if it's quite a YA read, but I think the main character in it is a high-schooler or something, so I guess it's probably close enough to qualify. Has anyone read that and maybe has an opinion on it? As for Animorphs... gosh, I think I stopped reading after the Hork-Bajir chronicles came out. Or the Andalite ones. Whichever came later, because I know I've read them both! I firmly blame that series for my fascination with monsters and such, I was seriously obsessed with hork-bajr and drew them constantly. I remember being SUPER pissed when they finally put one of the characters morphing into one on the cover, because they looked nothing like I imagined them in my head. That Damn Satyr fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jun 7, 2012 |
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Jun 7, 2012 06:12
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Hef Deezy posted:K.A. Applegate That reminds me of my first YA love (when I was 14): the Sweethearts series. Wouldn't be caught dead reading it in public now, but that's the first series that I really devoured; the first 4 books in it, anyway.
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Jun 7, 2012 06:26
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Hef Deezy posted:That Cassie book really was one of the most out-of-their-asses plots, up there with the whole Atlantis thing in I think #36. Thing about the Australia book is that the outline literally stopped in the middle to say "and now we need like 75 pages to fill, so research Australia and do whatever you want," so I think the ghostwriter (Lisa Harkrader) ultimately did a pretty good job considering what she was given to work with. Not that it was an especially good book otherwise. It would have served them right if she'd had Cassie get plonked down in latte-sipping, hipster-strewn inner-city Melbourne. Or the stock market business skyscrapers of Sydney. Or a windswept, snowy fisherman's island in Tasmania. Or a high-class beach resort in the Whitsundays. I remember the Atlantis one but had no problem with it; it was way, way out there, but at least it was a fresh and original idea, instead of the shooting-on-location "South park... IN ASPEN!" quality to the Australian one. edit - actually I'm willing to bet they just wanted her to morph a kangaroo, and built the plot around that.
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Jun 7, 2012 13:18
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I'm not sure I ever read the particular one you guys are talking about... but I'm seriously getting the heebies thinking about Cassie having to touch some of the particularly lovely wildlife that lives in Austrailia to acquire them. In retrospect though, once she got home that would be a totally awesome prank on the others. "Hey, has anyone seen Cas-- OH poo poo WHAT THE gently caress GIANT SPIDER SMASH." And these are all the reasons that Satyr will never be a writer. 
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Jun 7, 2012 17:44
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