Dagrim's Tales

Just finished: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval. I really don't know what to make of it. It's one of those very cool concepts—body horror! time travel! art! black metal! feminism!—that fails somewhat in execution but fails in interesting ways. It's divided into three parts, the first being a stream-of-consciousness rant by a girl who joins a Norwegian black metal band/aspiring witches coven a few years too late, after the scene has fallen apart, and her desire to rebel against the patriarchy and religion. By the end of the first section I had gone from "well, this is how teenage girls sound, this is how I sounded when I was a teenager" to vaguely annoyed. But then the second two, which are hallucinogenic body horror fever dreams, absolutely whip. I wanted the whole book to be like that.

Currently reading: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. Why am I reading a book about writing YA when I have no desire to ever write YA, and knowing the thoughts of teenagers is something I strongly feel I should not have to do without financial compensation? Well, because I got into a discussion with another writer about craft books, and how I don't normally read them, and he recommended this and another one to change my mind about craft books. And also because I seem to have written myself into a situation where I have a teenage POV character, and despite being surrounded by kids all day, writing as one is a whole different ballgame.

So far it's pretty good—I rather like the brainstorming exercises at the end of each section, and the respect that the author has for really good children's/YA fiction (which does, of course, exist, and there's probably even more of it than when I was young, but I wasn't particularly interested in reading about teenagers when I was a teenager). It's 2017 though, so there's a lot more praise for a certain Formerly Beloved Children's Author than she deserves, so if you're going to read it, be warned.