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merrilyI've been offline for a week, and during that week I read City of Bones, which arrived promptly three days after I finally remembered to ask the Simon & Schuster rep for a copy.
This isn't a review, because the thing that pisses me off most in my daily work life is when people come into my store looking for a book that was recently reviewed, but won't be available for months. So. I am not going to do the thing that makes me swear at magazine and newspaper editors on a daily basis.
I do have review-y things to say, but I'll post that in April.
That's besides the point, though, because the thing that everyone in fandom wanted to know, of course, was 'is she doing the work herself?' or, to be more blunt, 'did she steal anything?
She quotes various poets in the dialogue, but she acknowledges in-text, in another character's mouth, when she does it and who the quote is from. She uses various fantasy archetypes, but no-one owns them, and if we're going to get huffy about vampires being at war with werewolves and tweedy replacement father-figures teaching children to hunt demons -- well, there's a lot of authors to get huffy with.
The person who was writing on Journal_Fen about the fanfic plagiarizing debacle said that part of what bothered her, before she identified the scenes that Ms. Clare had lifted, was that the flow seemed to change -- the voice suddenly differed, and it made sense when she realized that the reason was that it wasn't Ms. Clare's work.
I didn't feel that way about any point in City of Bones, which makes me fairly confident in saying, as above, that I think it's all Cassandra Clare.
I do suspect, however, that some of it is recycled from her fanfic. Which I haven't read, to be aboveboard, but the title is something she used previously, and she's used the same quotation to open the book as she did with the Ron/Ginny fanfic called "Mortal Instruments." I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the one-liners are also from her previous work.
Does this matter? Not really. Ms. Clare, I suspect, sees fanfic as writing practice. And practice pieces are something that can be cannibalized for other work. I've done this too, but I haven't done it with things that are finished and published. Other people do. I've read short stories -- by Roald Dahl, for example -- that the authors have later expanded into novels. The difference, though, is that the Dahl pieces that gave birth to Boy and to Henry Sugar use the same characters and situations as the completed novels. I can't think of a piece where the author has used bits to create or flesh-out an entirely different story. (This is not to say that it hasn't happened.)
In conclusion, if the thing that bothered you about Ms. Clare plagiarizing text was that she wasn't treating fanfic with respect, I'm not sure you'll be comforted by City of Bones. If you don't care about that, and you're a fan of YA, it's a good piece of original fiction. I have things to praise and things to criticize about it, and I will do so in five months.
---
Also, that Grey's Anatomy "mountain men in the wild" line? So. Silly.
That's all from my fandom for this week, I think.
This isn't a review, because the thing that pisses me off most in my daily work life is when people come into my store looking for a book that was recently reviewed, but won't be available for months. So. I am not going to do the thing that makes me swear at magazine and newspaper editors on a daily basis.
I do have review-y things to say, but I'll post that in April.
That's besides the point, though, because the thing that everyone in fandom wanted to know, of course, was 'is she doing the work herself?' or, to be more blunt, 'did she steal anything?
She quotes various poets in the dialogue, but she acknowledges in-text, in another character's mouth, when she does it and who the quote is from. She uses various fantasy archetypes, but no-one owns them, and if we're going to get huffy about vampires being at war with werewolves and tweedy replacement father-figures teaching children to hunt demons -- well, there's a lot of authors to get huffy with.
The person who was writing on Journal_Fen about the fanfic plagiarizing debacle said that part of what bothered her, before she identified the scenes that Ms. Clare had lifted, was that the flow seemed to change -- the voice suddenly differed, and it made sense when she realized that the reason was that it wasn't Ms. Clare's work.
I didn't feel that way about any point in City of Bones, which makes me fairly confident in saying, as above, that I think it's all Cassandra Clare.
I do suspect, however, that some of it is recycled from her fanfic. Which I haven't read, to be aboveboard, but the title is something she used previously, and she's used the same quotation to open the book as she did with the Ron/Ginny fanfic called "Mortal Instruments." I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the one-liners are also from her previous work.
Does this matter? Not really. Ms. Clare, I suspect, sees fanfic as writing practice. And practice pieces are something that can be cannibalized for other work. I've done this too, but I haven't done it with things that are finished and published. Other people do. I've read short stories -- by Roald Dahl, for example -- that the authors have later expanded into novels. The difference, though, is that the Dahl pieces that gave birth to Boy and to Henry Sugar use the same characters and situations as the completed novels. I can't think of a piece where the author has used bits to create or flesh-out an entirely different story. (This is not to say that it hasn't happened.)
In conclusion, if the thing that bothered you about Ms. Clare plagiarizing text was that she wasn't treating fanfic with respect, I'm not sure you'll be comforted by City of Bones. If you don't care about that, and you're a fan of YA, it's a good piece of original fiction. I have things to praise and things to criticize about it, and I will do so in five months.
---
Also, that Grey's Anatomy "mountain men in the wild" line? So. Silly.
That's all from my fandom for this week, I think.