Reading with expectations
Feb. 24th, 2013 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOne of the books I failed to buy at Borderlands in San Francisco was Leah Bobet's Above. The staff were very helpful, and looked it up, and thought they remembered reading good things about it, and maybe they should stock it - so clearly they hadn't sold out, this was a book which had somehow sailed past their radar. A couple of days later I found both of the books I'd been looking for at the Santa Cruz bookshop, on the YA shelves. No argument about Janni Lee Simner's Faerie Winter, but I had been watching Above grow in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
leahbobet's daily metrics, and it had never crossed my mind that its genre affiliation would be YA rather than straight fantasy*.
Yet once I'd been handed that label, I could easily read it as YA fiction: the adolescent central characters, the coming of age elements of the story, the particular flavour of the urban fantasy - and this isn't in any way to dismiss or diminish it: it's a tremendous book, and an impressive piece of writing (it's written in first person present tense and it gets away with it, that's how well written it is). Which is presumably why, since I started writing this, it was announced that Above had been nominated for the 2012 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Really, that's the only part of this that matters: that it's a good book, that I enjoyed reading it, and that you don't have to take my word for it. But it set me thinking, once again, about the expectations with which we approach books, and the rare and particular pleasure of reading a book of which we have no expectations, which we come to completely spoiler-free. Which is how I read Above. I'd watched its construction, darling by daily darling, and I didn't know even as much of its plot as is revealed by the blurb on Leah Bobet's website.
Despite all of which, I managed to trip over my own expectations: without, I hope, giving too much away, I assumed certain things about the world as Matthew narrates it, and the things I assumed were a less nuanced and less interesting world than the one Leah Bobet has created. At a certain point in the narrative I realised that she was ahead of me, which is only one of the things about this book that made me very happy.
*To be fair, YA is much less established as a genre in the UK than it is in the US: we are more accustomed to the category " books for older children". Which isn't always a good fit.
leahbobet's daily metrics, and it had never crossed my mind that its genre affiliation would be YA rather than straight fantasy*.Yet once I'd been handed that label, I could easily read it as YA fiction: the adolescent central characters, the coming of age elements of the story, the particular flavour of the urban fantasy - and this isn't in any way to dismiss or diminish it: it's a tremendous book, and an impressive piece of writing (it's written in first person present tense and it gets away with it, that's how well written it is). Which is presumably why, since I started writing this, it was announced that Above had been nominated for the 2012 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Really, that's the only part of this that matters: that it's a good book, that I enjoyed reading it, and that you don't have to take my word for it. But it set me thinking, once again, about the expectations with which we approach books, and the rare and particular pleasure of reading a book of which we have no expectations, which we come to completely spoiler-free. Which is how I read Above. I'd watched its construction, darling by daily darling, and I didn't know even as much of its plot as is revealed by the blurb on Leah Bobet's website.
Despite all of which, I managed to trip over my own expectations: without, I hope, giving too much away, I assumed certain things about the world as Matthew narrates it, and the things I assumed were a less nuanced and less interesting world than the one Leah Bobet has created. At a certain point in the narrative I realised that she was ahead of me, which is only one of the things about this book that made me very happy.
*To be fair, YA is much less established as a genre in the UK than it is in the US: we are more accustomed to the category " books for older children". Which isn't always a good fit.
