Sarah Yoon > Recent Status Updates

The style is simple and sweet, but Barnhill keeps layering in darker themes and complex mysteries. It's amazing.

Dude, Crichton, this is a treatise disguised as a thriller. Fear has melted into yawns and glazed eyes.

Growing on me and getting a little more dynamic.

3 chapters in and the main character has been an apathetic wash, but there's hope that chapter 4 will get things moving.

I knew this was coming, but AUGH! SO SAD! Must play happy music now.

Tan's insight into 3rd culture identity and conflict is fantastic. She's bringing out so many issues that a lot of people either don't know about, or, on the other hand, experience daily but aren't able to communicate.

"the spider cozied up to me" lol. Not expecting that!

It's a quick read, which is about right for middle grade reading levels. There are fewer sentence fragments now, so the pacing feels more natural. The adventure is still fun and I'm looking forward to the next discovery.

Story is fun, characters make me smile, and the conflict is genuine. Nice. My one beef is the extensive use of sentence fragments. I really like the writer's voice, but it's hidden under stylization that makes the prose feel a little choppy.

In the intro Le Guin promised that the book isn't for beginners, but so far she's offered basic information without adding any intermediate or advanced analysis. I hope she digs deeper as she goes along...

I need to read a thriller after this to get this guy's prose out of my head! The concept is good, but man is it wordy. He's fluffing so much that I started skimming past the redundancies.

I'm getting more involved in the material now that I'm away from the "here are all the definitions of everything" stage. My WIP needs more focus and pinning down a central premise will really help.

The first two chapters were overly academic and self aware in a "look at me and my smart ideas" sort of way, but in chapter three we're finally getting to some practicable analysis.

How have I never read this before? I must've been crazy not to. It's pretty amazing. I always want to write after I read even a few pages.