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Dec. 4th, 2008 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI have read most of China Mieville's adult novels, so I would probably have read his YA Un Lun Dun even without ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shati's recommendation, but it certainly did not hurt!
Basically, Un Lun Dun is a Someone From Our World Saves the Otherworld quest fantasy that knows all the rules for the kind of book it's supposed to be, and is not at all shy at pointing out exactly how dumb some of them are. Naturally, I find this awesome. Zanna and Deeba are two twelve-year-old girls who find a Neverwhere-ish AlternaLondon called, unsurprisingly, UnLondon. Zanna is the Chosen One Described In The Prophecy; Deeba is along for the ride. Zanna starts to realize the Responsibility of her Role; Deeba makes friends with a milk carton. Everyone knows exactly how this book is going for about the first quarter, at which point it puts on the breaks and zooms off in a totally different and much more interesting direction.
I highly approve of what Mieville is doing here in everything except one: his writing here is really, really noticeably less stylistically complex than in his adult books. He still has his trademark density of creatively fantastical ideas (binjas! See icon! I want one!) but he's trying so hard to write a Young Adult book that the prose sometimes reads really flat, and comes alive mostly when the characters are talking. I probably wouldn't have been bothered by this as much or at all if I wasn't consistently impressed by Mieville's style and imagery in his adult books, but as it is I know what he can do when he's got his writing switched on. And while I get that if you're writing for twelve-year-olds you don't write the same way as if you're writing for twenty-year-olds . . . it's possible to write prose that's not quite as intense while still being complex and interesting. Elizabeth Knox, another beautiful stylist who recently made the crossover to YA, managed a simpler-but-still-gorgeous style really well in her Dreamhunter duo; conversely, Diana Wynne Jones (shut up, I know, it is impossible that I not bring her in) manages to write prose that is very simple while never being obvious, and rewards older readers as much as young ones. So I really do not think Mieville needed to dumb his prose down to that extent. This is just me, though; if you guys have different opinions on what needs to happen to make a book specifically YA rather than For Adults, I would really like to hear them!
And all that being said, I still enjoyed and would recommend the book! Especially if you feel as if you have seen Chosen Girl Fulfills Prophecy, Saves World a time or ten too often.
shati's recommendation, but it certainly did not hurt! Basically, Un Lun Dun is a Someone From Our World Saves the Otherworld quest fantasy that knows all the rules for the kind of book it's supposed to be, and is not at all shy at pointing out exactly how dumb some of them are. Naturally, I find this awesome. Zanna and Deeba are two twelve-year-old girls who find a Neverwhere-ish AlternaLondon called, unsurprisingly, UnLondon. Zanna is the Chosen One Described In The Prophecy; Deeba is along for the ride. Zanna starts to realize the Responsibility of her Role; Deeba makes friends with a milk carton. Everyone knows exactly how this book is going for about the first quarter, at which point it puts on the breaks and zooms off in a totally different and much more interesting direction.
I highly approve of what Mieville is doing here in everything except one: his writing here is really, really noticeably less stylistically complex than in his adult books. He still has his trademark density of creatively fantastical ideas (binjas! See icon! I want one!) but he's trying so hard to write a Young Adult book that the prose sometimes reads really flat, and comes alive mostly when the characters are talking. I probably wouldn't have been bothered by this as much or at all if I wasn't consistently impressed by Mieville's style and imagery in his adult books, but as it is I know what he can do when he's got his writing switched on. And while I get that if you're writing for twelve-year-olds you don't write the same way as if you're writing for twenty-year-olds . . . it's possible to write prose that's not quite as intense while still being complex and interesting. Elizabeth Knox, another beautiful stylist who recently made the crossover to YA, managed a simpler-but-still-gorgeous style really well in her Dreamhunter duo; conversely, Diana Wynne Jones (shut up, I know, it is impossible that I not bring her in) manages to write prose that is very simple while never being obvious, and rewards older readers as much as young ones. So I really do not think Mieville needed to dumb his prose down to that extent. This is just me, though; if you guys have different opinions on what needs to happen to make a book specifically YA rather than For Adults, I would really like to hear them!
And all that being said, I still enjoyed and would recommend the book! Especially if you feel as if you have seen Chosen Girl Fulfills Prophecy, Saves World a time or ten too often.
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Date: 2008-12-05 03:32 am (UTC)I definitely don't think complexity of writing is a factor in YA vs. adult. People like John Green and Sara Zarr and Meg Rosoff write, IMO, fairly complex (in terms of prose) YA, and E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is one of the most complex books, idea-wise, that I've read all year.
I think the only thing that makes a book YA is the age of the protagonist (but then, Meg Rosoff's What I Was is told from the POV of an adult, and it works decently well as a YA). I am taking a Writing the YA Novel class starting in January, so perhaps I'll have a more enlightened answer then.
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Date: 2008-12-05 02:46 pm (UTC)Yeah, I actually tend to think a lot of YA-marketed books have a lot more complexity than some of their adult-marketed counterparts. And of course the line between YA and adult tends to blur a lot depending on what the publisher thinks is most marketable - I think my favorite example of this is the reprints of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, which are obviously big fat adult fantasy, and which I have now being marketed in the YA sections, exactly the same books, just sub-divided into halves or thirds to make them shorter. Which I think is hilarious, personally. But there are a number of books that you can find in either YA or adult depending on how the bookseller feels like shelving them.