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Oct. 19th, 2010 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe plot of Drew Hayden Taylor's The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel is pretty basic, and goes something like this:
TIFFANY: I am an Ordinary Teenager with Ordinary Teenaged Concerns! Like my parents are divorcing and my mom left the reservation, and school is soooo boring, and my dad doesn't like my new boyfriend, and my new boyfriend may just be using me for my reservation discount, and we have to put up a stupid boarder in the basement, and did I mention school is soooo boring?
PIERRE: Hello, I am your new boarder. Also I am an angsty vampire.
THE READER, SUSPICIOUS: Pierre, you are not here to romance high-school girls, are you?
PIERRE: No no no! Just to share my angsty backstory and teach them valuable life lessons about appreciating what's weirdly important.
THE READER: That seems . . . really straightforward and weirdly non-Gothic.
PIERRE: Just remember, Tiffany, your life won't seem so terrible when you have heard about my centuries of wandering the earth as a cursed being. Also, stay in school!
I ended up with fairly mixed feelings about this book. The author definitely has a sense of humor, and he's mocking Tiffany's Totally Normal Teenaged self-centeredness as much as identifying with her; conceptually I don't have a problem with this, but in practice it sort of made it hard for me to care about her as a character. There are a couple of scenes that are definitely intentionally funny, like when the vampire and Tiffany's dad are sitting around making EXCRUCIATINGLY AWKWARD small talk in the morning. But then there is the vampire's angst, which is pretty cliche angst - surprisingly cliche, given the fact that Pierre is one of a very few non-white vampires in fiction and I was expecting a more compelling backstory - and is mostly played straight? I think? And that kind of contrasted oddly against all the scenes of Tiffany rolling her eyes and sulking about homework. I don't know, in theory it's a combination of pieces that could have worked, but in the end I think it didn't quite come together. Or maybe I just was not expecting such straightforward Valuable Life Lessons-learning from a vampire novel.
I still liked it better than I generally like the kind of vampire books with romance, though!
TIFFANY: I am an Ordinary Teenager with Ordinary Teenaged Concerns! Like my parents are divorcing and my mom left the reservation, and school is soooo boring, and my dad doesn't like my new boyfriend, and my new boyfriend may just be using me for my reservation discount, and we have to put up a stupid boarder in the basement, and did I mention school is soooo boring?
PIERRE: Hello, I am your new boarder. Also I am an angsty vampire.
THE READER, SUSPICIOUS: Pierre, you are not here to romance high-school girls, are you?
PIERRE: No no no! Just to share my angsty backstory and teach them valuable life lessons about appreciating what's weirdly important.
THE READER: That seems . . . really straightforward and weirdly non-Gothic.
PIERRE: Just remember, Tiffany, your life won't seem so terrible when you have heard about my centuries of wandering the earth as a cursed being. Also, stay in school!
I ended up with fairly mixed feelings about this book. The author definitely has a sense of humor, and he's mocking Tiffany's Totally Normal Teenaged self-centeredness as much as identifying with her; conceptually I don't have a problem with this, but in practice it sort of made it hard for me to care about her as a character. There are a couple of scenes that are definitely intentionally funny, like when the vampire and Tiffany's dad are sitting around making EXCRUCIATINGLY AWKWARD small talk in the morning. But then there is the vampire's angst, which is pretty cliche angst - surprisingly cliche, given the fact that Pierre is one of a very few non-white vampires in fiction and I was expecting a more compelling backstory - and is mostly played straight? I think? And that kind of contrasted oddly against all the scenes of Tiffany rolling her eyes and sulking about homework. I don't know, in theory it's a combination of pieces that could have worked, but in the end I think it didn't quite come together. Or maybe I just was not expecting such straightforward Valuable Life Lessons-learning from a vampire novel.
I still liked it better than I generally like the kind of vampire books with romance, though!
