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Liar, liar, pants on fire
I'd probably not have leapt to read Justine Larbalestier's Liar so fast if not for the cover kerfuffle, so I suppose I should be grateful for it. But I am frustrated at how many expectations of the book I had because of various information revealed during the brouhaha. The book premise, packaging (with either US cover), and characterization set me up for an entirely different story, and many of the narrative's reveals might have come differently to me had I not been reading with expectation in mind.
That being said, I loved the book -- and I can't even talk about the two most interesting reasons it struck me particularly with where I am in my literary interests right now, because the briefest discussion of why it made me so thoughtful will give you the same spoilery experience it gave me, grr argh. Maybe once its nature is more generally known, or more of you have read it. I will go so far as to say that today before and during class we had some interesting discussions about varied types of unreliable narrators, and I will leave it at that.
One thing I can say is that having read it, Melanie Cecka's defense of the original cover rings a lot less true to me. I'm unwilling to attribute bad faith argument to anyone in the industry -- I've never yet met a children's literature person who didn't want to do the right thing -- but I can't imagine how any reading of Liar could leave the heroine's race and nappiness in doubt (or at least, any more in doubt than, say, her age, her gender, or her existence). As it is, the cover's not a great represntation of her, though it's more marketable than a more accurate represntation would be.
In some ways it reminded me of nothing so much as John Marsden's Letters from the Inside, though of course it was very different. And the Marsden is more of a punch in the gut, if only because the reader finishes that book with some highly likely suspicions about the true nature of reality.
I'd like to work on a taxonomy of unreliable narrators, running from Marsden's or Megan Whalen Turner's (lying to the readers as well as to other characters), through to Hautman's Invisible's psychiatrically lacking access to reality, Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime's non-neurotypical worldview for a predominantly neurotypical readership, to narrator's who simply have the facts wrong (such as Larbalestier's own Reason Cansino).
Side note: Any class discussion which leads me to make the note "Xander:Willow :: Meg:Charles Wallace" has got to be great, eh?
That being said, I loved the book -- and I can't even talk about the two most interesting reasons it struck me particularly with where I am in my literary interests right now, because the briefest discussion of why it made me so thoughtful will give you the same spoilery experience it gave me, grr argh. Maybe once its nature is more generally known, or more of you have read it. I will go so far as to say that today before and during class we had some interesting discussions about varied types of unreliable narrators, and I will leave it at that.
One thing I can say is that having read it, Melanie Cecka's defense of the original cover rings a lot less true to me. I'm unwilling to attribute bad faith argument to anyone in the industry -- I've never yet met a children's literature person who didn't want to do the right thing -- but I can't imagine how any reading of Liar could leave the heroine's race and nappiness in doubt (or at least, any more in doubt than, say, her age, her gender, or her existence). As it is, the cover's not a great represntation of her, though it's more marketable than a more accurate represntation would be.
In some ways it reminded me of nothing so much as John Marsden's Letters from the Inside, though of course it was very different. And the Marsden is more of a punch in the gut, if only because the reader finishes that book with some highly likely suspicions about the true nature of reality.
I'd like to work on a taxonomy of unreliable narrators, running from Marsden's or Megan Whalen Turner's (lying to the readers as well as to other characters), through to Hautman's Invisible's psychiatrically lacking access to reality, Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime's non-neurotypical worldview for a predominantly neurotypical readership, to narrator's who simply have the facts wrong (such as Larbalestier's own Reason Cansino).
Side note: Any class discussion which leads me to make the note "Xander:Willow :: Meg:Charles Wallace" has got to be great, eh?