Dear Carrie Jones,

The really thrilling cover image is what attracted me to Need–I anticipated some creepy sexiness, some dense forests, some pale women with glittery lips.  I’d even heard that your book was like Twilight, but with pixies instead of vampires.  What I didn’t realize was that it was going to be almost exactly like Twilight but with pixies instead of vampires.  I have to say, I was excited at first because the Twilight books fulfilled a sort of 14-year-old craving in me even though I found them poorly written, and you started off with slightly better prose but a very similar setup.  Unfortunately, better-than-Meyer prose wasn’t enough to keep this from being like a cover of a song–changed just enough to differentiate it from the source, but it’s still the same old song that everybody’s heard too many times already.  The characters were quite flat, the pacing of the plot was uneven and the revelation of info was too fast.  The danger didn’t feel dangerous, and the romance wasn’t romantic.  Too many elements seemed lifted directly out of Twilight–the girl moving to the small forested town with bad weather, the budding romance with the boy in the really nice car who protects her and whose skin is too hot, the pixies who drink blood, run fast, have pointy teeth and live in a mansion in the woods…even her arm getting broken by a pixie captor.  It started to get old pretty fast.  I also found the ending unsatisfying–it didn’t actually feel finished to me, and I was shocked when I realized there wasn’t any more text.  The weird thing is that if your flap copy is to be believed, then some of your other writing has had good recognition–so I’m going to assume that this book is just a fluke, churned out too fast in the hopes of jumping on the mythological creatures bandwagon.  Sorry–two stars.

Love,

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Dear Gregory Maguire,

Okay. Wicked the musical is my most recent obsession. I adore it. So much so that I decided to read Wicked the book, which I’ve attempted to do before, with great lack of success. This time I suffered all the way through it, and still hated it. I can see why some readers like it, I really can, but it was NOT the book for me. Your writing style is drier than a desert, the dialogue is lifeless, and I found all of the characters, even Elphaba, mostly unlikable. Their personalities seemed to change drastically from section to section, and even from chapter to chapter… I never felt like I was reading about the same people I’d been reading about before. There were too many loose ends, also, things that got brought up but never were resolved or heard of again, and things I felt should be important weren’t, while things I couldn’t care less about became featured. The ending was just awful. The one thing I did appreciate was your varied use of the source material–I found that I always agreed with your choice as to whether to draw from the book or from the movie when you were making a reference to existing stories. I’m glad I now know what happens in the book, because it’s very different from the musical, but that’s about as far as I can go with this one.  Sorry, Mr. Maguire…two stars.

Love,

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