Read All The Books Aaaaaah! discussion

Library hold came in, so this one's next, once I'm done with Sabriel.

So far there's a decided lack of characterisation. It's first person, so we're getting plenty of Sally's internal thoughts, but she's just gotten married to Jack and they're off on their honeymoon with no dialogue between them aside from Jack explaining things to Sally about the holiday town they're going to. There are some loving looks between them, but no words to back them up.

Since we're seeing from Sally's perspective, we get more of the mentality of a denizen of Halloween Town, which is similar to the Addams Family thing where they talk about spiders, poisons, decaying skulls, and graves like other people talk about rainbows and kittens. Except she also talks about her former home's moth-eaten bed as if a moth-eaten bed is a bad thing, when all the other decayed things are good things.

There's also this:

"The air smells different, too, like black licorice and raven wings and a little like pumpkin jam, nothing like the foul stench of sodium chloride and rubbing alcohol that permeates Dr. Finkelstein’s lab, a place that was once my home—but also a prison."

Uh, okay, you know sodium chloride is just salt, right? Not known for its foul stench.

Also, when they're about to leave for their honeymoon, the mayor reminds them that Halloween is 2 weeks away. So they waited a year to get married. But no explanation or hint of what they were doing all that time.

Sally keeps referring to nonexistent parts of Jack's anatomy, and she's pointing out all kinds of things in this other holiday world like she knows what they are, but she would never have seen these things before; things they don't have in Halloween Town.

"I had been nervous about leaving Halloween Town, but now, only a day later, I find I’m not ready to go back."

I wouldn't be ready to go back, either! This "honeymoon" was just an overnight stay! What did they even need a suitcase for?

Sally is Halloween Town's FIRST Pumpkin Queen. This suggests that they're pretty new to monarchy. Personally, I never thought Jack was an actual KING king, more like just the master of pumpkins. But here, they're actual royalty.

The only way I can explain the nonsensical and contradictory world-building in this book, and the writing style in general, is that it was actually written for middle grade, and mis-marketed.

It doesn't help that this book apparently invents (unless there was some other Nightmare Before Christmas media that established this before) several additional worlds besides the holiday worlds, but doesn't do a very good job tying them into the established lore. There's Dream Town which has been closed off (and somehow forgotten about by everyone within Sally's lifetime), and there's the "human world". There was no human world in the movie -- when Jack went to Christmas Town, that was the world where everything revolves around X-mas, and it has humans in it for the purpose of celebrating X-mas, but it's not the human world.

Up until this point, Sally didn't even give any indication that she knew there was such a thing as a human world, since she was convinced that she'd explored every possible world until she discovered the door to Dream Town. But when the governors of Dream Town offhandedly refer to the human world in conversation, she acts like she knew about it all along. So far it hasn't been explained how to get there.

I really wanted to like this, but it was a massive disappointment, and now I'm just waiting for it to be over. Maybe tomorrow, hopefully.

oh no. my library finally got it too

I made 2 or 3 updates mentioning when the book was coming in and when I'd be starting, but you didn't respond to them, so I didn't think you wanted to do the group read anymore anyway.

So why doesn't the Sandman recognise her? She has to tell him who she is, and it's like she's introducing herself to a stranger, and he just reacts cluelessly. (view spoiler)[But she's from his world, and even if she hadn't been born yet when he was banished, she's the daughter of two people who lived there at the time, who he would have known considering how small the town is, and she looks just like them. [Update: He calls her father by name, and indicates that he did in fact know him well.] He ought to have at least suspected she was from that place, and that the sand wouldn't work on her. (hide spoiler)]

And speaking of the sand, (view spoiler)[how does he have a seemingly unlimited supply, considering it's established that the sand is manufactured in the factories of Dream Town, and he was using up so much on his excursions to the human world that they were having to work overtime, so they built walls, locked him out, and put guards around the factory while he was out one night using what he had in his pockets, and he wouldn't have been able to refresh his supply after that. But he somehow still has enough in his pockets to put everyone in all of the holiday towns AND the human world to sleep? (hide spoiler)]

There are a number of characters in this book who have names like Corpse Kid, Mummy Boy, Winged Demon, Undersea Gal, and (sigh) Clown With the Tear-Away Face, which were listed in the movie credits under those names, but those are obviously placeholder names for minor characters that were never given actual names. An adaptation like this is where those characters should have been given names, not just using the placeholders.

The way the book ends, I no longer have any doubt that this was written for a middle grade audience. The wrap-up for the villains was even more kid-friendly than the movie's counterpart. The marketing team did the author a grave disservice in marketing this as a YA title, because it is far, far too kiddy for that. And a lot of the nonsensical world-building and internal inconsistencies would probably have been unimportant for a middle grade audience. Was it because of all the Halloweeny talk of graves and corpses (all those ghoulish metaphors she was using dropped off sharply after the first couple of chapters anyway)? Maybe because it involved the main character getting married and going on a honeymoon and occasionally going on rhapsodies of love for Jack?

In any case, a big mistake, because marketing a book to the wrong audience is a great way to get a poor rating. I would give this no more than 2 stars as it was presented to me. But knowing that it likely wasn't intended for me, I'll just refrain from giving it a rating rather than artificially inflate my rating to try to account for it.

I think fans of the movie would enjoy the Nightmare Before Christmas references in this song more than this book.

Blink 182 - I Miss You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2ySt...