Need, by Carrie Jones
Mar. 22nd, 2009 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanaisethis book just referred to "big metal railroad ties from the train tracks." FAIL.
FAIL FAIL FAIL.
The word the author is looking for is RAILS. Ties are wooden. (I am also not 100% sure where the ties came from since I don't remember any explanation why grandma has several hundred/thousand pounds of railroad stuff lying around, but whatever. We had a ton of wooden ties out back of the garage for a good 15 years or so, simply because one of my dad's friends built a bridge out of railroad ties and had some leftover.)
I am not the target audience for this book: it's YA, and while not sucky overall, it was a book which i think would have a different impact at 15 than having read all of the various influences to this already.
Basically: Zara's stepdad--the guy who raised her--dies, she goes a little bit sad-crazy, and her mom sends her to Maine to live with her stepgrandmother. In Maine she sees a strange guy on the side of the road who she's seen twice before--when her dad died, and at the airport. Her grandmother also sees the guy, so she knows she's not crazy. She goes to school, makes friends and enemies, and discovers that kids--boys--are disappearing, as they did ages and ages ago, just before her mom got pregnant, married her stepdad, and moved to Charleston. Zara and her friends do some research, discover that the creepy guy is a Pixie who is looking for his queen. For 'pixie' in this book read 'Unseelie Court Fae' since that's basically the definition we're given. Oh, and from their they find out that the only natural enemy of the Pixies are the Were. So naturally it makes sense that this little town is a big old enclave of both *and* that even the Were kids don't know about Pixies. The girl of course is all "I totally believe in Pixies leaving gold dust all over the place, but Weres? That's just crazy talk." Of course, her hot new friend is a were, as is her grandmother, one of her other new friends, and possibly large portions of the town. Things transpire, another boy disappears, she gets kidnapped by a fringe group of Pixies looking for a hostile take over, they die, her mother comes up, the strange guy is revealed to be her Biodad, more things transpire. There's a showdown, the good guys win, and lock the bad guys up in their house with no way to escape and apparently nothing to do but wait to die. It is unclear as to how long this will take. I am forced to wonder if the repeated mention of amnesty international--and the symbol for it--is supposed to be a significant image since they essentially wrap the house up in barbed wire because the pixies can't cross iron, and leaving people imprisoned and waiting to die seems kinda...counter the whole AI thing.
Oh well. It wasn't a bad book. I mean, i finished it. It just wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. Like I said, if I had been 15, I think I wouldn't have seen as many of the flaws in it, and would have enjoyed it for what it was--faintly dark but entertaining, like Holly Black's stuff.
FAIL FAIL FAIL.
The word the author is looking for is RAILS. Ties are wooden. (I am also not 100% sure where the ties came from since I don't remember any explanation why grandma has several hundred/thousand pounds of railroad stuff lying around, but whatever. We had a ton of wooden ties out back of the garage for a good 15 years or so, simply because one of my dad's friends built a bridge out of railroad ties and had some leftover.)
I am not the target audience for this book: it's YA, and while not sucky overall, it was a book which i think would have a different impact at 15 than having read all of the various influences to this already.
Basically: Zara's stepdad--the guy who raised her--dies, she goes a little bit sad-crazy, and her mom sends her to Maine to live with her stepgrandmother. In Maine she sees a strange guy on the side of the road who she's seen twice before--when her dad died, and at the airport. Her grandmother also sees the guy, so she knows she's not crazy. She goes to school, makes friends and enemies, and discovers that kids--boys--are disappearing, as they did ages and ages ago, just before her mom got pregnant, married her stepdad, and moved to Charleston. Zara and her friends do some research, discover that the creepy guy is a Pixie who is looking for his queen. For 'pixie' in this book read 'Unseelie Court Fae' since that's basically the definition we're given. Oh, and from their they find out that the only natural enemy of the Pixies are the Were. So naturally it makes sense that this little town is a big old enclave of both *and* that even the Were kids don't know about Pixies. The girl of course is all "I totally believe in Pixies leaving gold dust all over the place, but Weres? That's just crazy talk." Of course, her hot new friend is a were, as is her grandmother, one of her other new friends, and possibly large portions of the town. Things transpire, another boy disappears, she gets kidnapped by a fringe group of Pixies looking for a hostile take over, they die, her mother comes up, the strange guy is revealed to be her Biodad, more things transpire. There's a showdown, the good guys win, and lock the bad guys up in their house with no way to escape and apparently nothing to do but wait to die. It is unclear as to how long this will take. I am forced to wonder if the repeated mention of amnesty international--and the symbol for it--is supposed to be a significant image since they essentially wrap the house up in barbed wire because the pixies can't cross iron, and leaving people imprisoned and waiting to die seems kinda...counter the whole AI thing.
Oh well. It wasn't a bad book. I mean, i finished it. It just wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. Like I said, if I had been 15, I think I wouldn't have seen as many of the flaws in it, and would have enjoyed it for what it was--faintly dark but entertaining, like Holly Black's stuff.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-23 05:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-23 05:21 am (UTC)Okay, I had to go find the book and see when/why railroad ties were mentioned. All it says is that the grandmother has them in her basement. No material is mentioned with them, no reason for having them is given, be they wood or metal. We made some of ours into benches, but you can't burn them, so we mostly just piled them up and waited for them to rot. So I have no idea what the author was going for. Other than BEING WRONG.
And really, the more I think about locking up the pixies until they all die, the less I feel it fits with the rest of the book. I keep hoping maybe I missed a chapter.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-23 05:42 am (UTC)(Weres vs. pixies? For real?)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-23 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-23 10:54 am (UTC)