Forged by Fire, Sharon Draper
Book: 1
Title: Forged by Fire
Author: Sharon Draper
Genre: YA
One-sentence summary: This kid in the projects whose name I've forgotten has a drug-addicted, neglectful mother; she loses custody of him at 3 years old but regains it when he's 12, at which point he and the little sister he never knew he had have to find a way to deal with their mom's creep of a boyfriend.
Why did you get this book?</b> I was jonesing for something new to read, and it needed to be cheap, which meant YA, and bought on my lunch break, which meant Borders. Borders has a really shitty selection of YA lit, and this had won the Coretta Scott King Award and was like $6, so there you go.
Do you like the cover? I don't remember. I returned the book the day after I bought it.
Did you enjoy the book? No. It was awful. I told λ as I was reading it that it was about five percent more plausible than Such a Pretty Girl but only half as well-written. I am so damn sick of people trying to write about abusive relationships when they have no idea what an abusive dynamic actually looks like. That, and this woman's prose is horrendous, her characterization is for shit, her eye for nuance is nil, and she's afraid to write about the subjects she is in fact writing about, which is hilarious. Don't write a book about sexual abuse if you're so afraid to talk about it that as far as your readers are concerned the abuser's worst crime may have been to give a kid a hug. I mean, I'm not saying everything needs to be described really blatantly and blow-for-blow, but if you're not going to tell us what happened, you'd better have the skill to make us understand it and have at least as potent an emotional reaction as we would have if we knew the specifics of what was happening. This woman doesn't have that skill. Because she has no skill as a writer. At all. I cannot imagine why the Coretta Scott King Awards, which I have always trusted in the past, would have given the award to this piece of shit. I'm guessing it had to be that they read the first chapter, skimmed a plot summary, and then rubber-stamped it; the first chapter, which was published as a short story initially and *had* to have been edited extensively by someone with a real eye, was much better than the rest of the book.
Was the author new to you and would you read something by this author again? Yes. No.
Are you keeping it or passing it on? I returned it immediately and got a copy of The Witches of Worm instead. Perhaps it is unethical to use a bookstore like a lending library but I was very careful to keep the Draper book in perfect shape and, really, I was not wasting $6 on that shit.
Anything else? Nah.
Scale of 1 to 10: 1
Title: Forged by Fire
Author: Sharon Draper
Genre: YA
One-sentence summary: This kid in the projects whose name I've forgotten has a drug-addicted, neglectful mother; she loses custody of him at 3 years old but regains it when he's 12, at which point he and the little sister he never knew he had have to find a way to deal with their mom's creep of a boyfriend.
Why did you get this book?</b> I was jonesing for something new to read, and it needed to be cheap, which meant YA, and bought on my lunch break, which meant Borders. Borders has a really shitty selection of YA lit, and this had won the Coretta Scott King Award and was like $6, so there you go.
Do you like the cover? I don't remember. I returned the book the day after I bought it.
Did you enjoy the book? No. It was awful. I told λ as I was reading it that it was about five percent more plausible than Such a Pretty Girl but only half as well-written. I am so damn sick of people trying to write about abusive relationships when they have no idea what an abusive dynamic actually looks like. That, and this woman's prose is horrendous, her characterization is for shit, her eye for nuance is nil, and she's afraid to write about the subjects she is in fact writing about, which is hilarious. Don't write a book about sexual abuse if you're so afraid to talk about it that as far as your readers are concerned the abuser's worst crime may have been to give a kid a hug. I mean, I'm not saying everything needs to be described really blatantly and blow-for-blow, but if you're not going to tell us what happened, you'd better have the skill to make us understand it and have at least as potent an emotional reaction as we would have if we knew the specifics of what was happening. This woman doesn't have that skill. Because she has no skill as a writer. At all. I cannot imagine why the Coretta Scott King Awards, which I have always trusted in the past, would have given the award to this piece of shit. I'm guessing it had to be that they read the first chapter, skimmed a plot summary, and then rubber-stamped it; the first chapter, which was published as a short story initially and *had* to have been edited extensively by someone with a real eye, was much better than the rest of the book.
Was the author new to you and would you read something by this author again? Yes. No.
Are you keeping it or passing it on? I returned it immediately and got a copy of The Witches of Worm instead. Perhaps it is unethical to use a bookstore like a lending library but I was very careful to keep the Draper book in perfect shape and, really, I was not wasting $6 on that shit.
Anything else? Nah.
Scale of 1 to 10: 1
