(no subject)

[olivermoss]

Like Real People Do by E L Massey - I finished the book, sort of. I knew there was a sequel, but I didn't realize that it's part of a four book series and the first two books are basically part 1 and part 2 of the same story. Like Real People Do picks a stopping point rather than having a solid ending, but that's fine with how the book is structured.

It's about a college kid who is a serious figure skater trying to navigate a seizure disorder. He winds up dating a closeted NHL hockey prodigy. I enjoyed it, but might take the rest of the series a book at a time.

It's very medium stakes. Nothing is high drama, but there are serious issues in both of the MC's lives that grounds the romantic fantasy elements. It's really well written, just not exactly my cup of tea. But, definitely the palate cleanser I needed after Goaltender Interference.

I don't typically like YA, anything involving teens, or meant for teens. One of the characters struggles to deal with his emotions in a way that feels real for his age without milking it for drama or making him feel unsafe to be around. I also liked how the characters are trying to handle a difficult situation and be mature about it, but every once in a while the far-more-mature character is just done with trying to be an adult and decides to just make out or lets himself sound a bit whiny. Basically, he goes easy on himself sometimes and gives himself permission to not try to be perfect, and that lets both Main Characters relax and keeps stress from building in the relationship. A lot of things are just really well handled.

Hockey score - I am going to give all hockey romances a hockey score from now on. It's decent! Doesn't really get much into hockey culture or crunchy things about hockey, but does get into the realism of things like minor injuries. There is no Major Injury plot point or drama, but the Hockey Player Main Character being banged up, run down and also on medication after a bad hit messing up his life a bit was a nice bit of realism. Massey definitely gets a point there. The Hockey Player Main Character being a captain at nineteen without someone wearing the 'A' to either support him or help mentor him into the role feels very unlikely, especially since he's a mess. He's not a mature young man, he's got underage DUIs. Making part of a leadership core and giving him the C symbolically would make more sense. But, it's part of the set up the author was going for so I'm not bothered. The unlikely-but-not-impossible bits are there for a reason.

Also, I really liked that the author understood the difference between hockey skating and figure skating, like that certain figure skate moves don't work in hockey skates. One reason I was very reluctant about trying this book was other authors ignoring all that, sometimes aggressively ignoring skating physics for cute moments.

Comments

[barbaratp]

Parece que casais gays no gelo (hockey, patinação) estão bastante na moda. Voltamos mesmo a 2016? YOI podia vir junto nessa leva não?

[mistressofmuses]

I'm glad you enjoyed it, even if it's a bit off to the side of what you'd usually go for.

There are some things I enjoy that may fall into the YA category, but for the most part, I'm just not the target audience, and I'm okay with that.

It sounds like the book has a good setup, and enjoyable characters.

[olivermoss]

The book didn't have the usual teen vibes, no sense that the author was trying to explain basic concepts to me through the story or like other YA weirdness. There was some therapy speak, but *mostly* the characters were using it because they were in therapy and didn't know how else to explain things. It didn't feel like it was the author who needed to use therapy speak to explain things

[mistressofmuses]

There's plenty of good YA out there, I know! But a lot of it has seemed to acquire that sort of... explanatory, this is Subject 101, modelling-good-behavior vibe to it. Or sometimes like the author is actively cringing away from something for the sake of the imagined audience.

(My current read has way too much therapy-speak/emotional awareness at times. That CAN be done well, especially when it is a character choice, but often it comes across as terribly awkward and NOT suited to the characters, and I don't love it as a trend.)

[olivermoss]

Despite all the modelling good behavior and being heavy handed about the lessons, a lot of the books really have a simplified morality to them that is just... not good. Really not properly thought through.

Yeah, I hate therapy speak especially since it's often crap. IRL talking that way would be weirdly aggro. But teens defaulting to it a bit because it's all they've seen modeled can work, as long as it's in the right context and they are struggling to communicate and bot being all 'look how emotionally healthy and smart I am!'

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh, right? Really frustrating simplified morality, where the characters are clearly Right or Wrong, and of course it can't be too messy or complicated, and any nuance is easy to handwave in some fashion... because The Morally Right Thing is always super obvious and being very clearly presented, here! Bleh.

Therapy speak can be a great choice for a character, when it's done deliberately. Teens trying to articulate something in the best way they know how? A character who is supposed to be awkward and stilted or distant? A character meant to be insufferably self-satisfied and manipulative? All great options! But when it seems like the author being preachy, it gets real grating real fast.

[olivermoss]

I see a lot of 'in the trolley problem... remove the trolley!' type stuff. Ignoring that the world isn't that simple is just... sometimes really not great. Things aren't always as easy as 'push the right button and everybody claps'.

Yeah, YA can also get really preachy. But also, YA is a weird category and didn't used to be a genre. Stuff written for, or about, that age group can be great and not have the YA-genre conventions

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh, for real! Like... great! Removing the trolley is great in theory. Refusing to actually engage with the way in which the world is complex, and failing to recognize that "fix everything with one simple trick" is almost never doable... is less great, actually.
I get the occasional desire to say "fuck the rules, fuck these constraints, I'm going to find a different way." But that in and of itself requires actually engaging with the problem, not just handwaving with an air of smugness about how you just simply don't acknowledge the trolley.
I have feelings about this.

YA is such a weirdly amorphous category. Watching things get reclassified as YA or shifted out of YA to suit different marketing trends makes it especially obvious. It is absolutely the stuff that is written TO suit the presumed YA category that tends to be the worst. As with any genre (maybe even more so since it is a category more than a genre), there's a huge variety in quality.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, exactly. Removing the trolley is an interesting solution, but not as easy one, and it's one with it's own costs. The morality of some YA stuff refuses to engage with reality and that always feels icky to me, because it feels very anti-intellectual and also reminds me of... all the refusing to engage with reality I see elsewhere. Like it's fine to write a cozy story with no stakes and things fall into place easily, that can be great, but in YA is has a moral edge that makes it a problem.

ACOTAR is still shelved at Powells as YA because that's how it was first published! Yeah, it's a mess of a category because it just used to be an industry term that people started treating like a genre term

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, the refusal to really engage with problems is one of the things that can get the most uncomfortable the fastest. (And actually being willing TO engage with difficult topics/dilemmas/etc. is often what makes the best stuff in YA stand out.)
I think you're very right that it feels super anti-intellectual. It's so reductive, and is the sort of thing that would have pissed me off as a teenager for feeling condescending. (Teens or 'young adults' deserve good books. Not whatever tepid, "easy," "unchallenging," works get churned out to spec for them.) It's hard for me not to see that as being related to things like book bans, where books that were required reading for me in school are now being considered "too upsetting" for teenagers. I didn't even love all of our required reading, but it wasn't psychologically damaging to have to deal with difficult subject matter!

Oof. Yeah, a marketing category is not really a genre, but that conflation has made it very messy. There's also the long-standing issue (maybe slightly less now than five or ten years ago) of female authors getting their very adult works automatically categorized as YA.

[olivermoss]

I skipped all that growing up, went right to fantasy and sci fi written for adults in elementary school and for some reason, well because of the way academic trends where at the time, read Moby Dick in fourth grade. We had grad students at our schools running programs related to the idea that kids should be exposed to stuff as early as possible. That's part of why I hate the trolley problem: that, Moby Dick and the Holocaust were all introduced to my class years before they would have been. So, I have very little sense of what good late teen / YA stuff should be like.

[mistressofmuses]

I read at least some stuff that would have been classed as "YA" now, and some of it I know is now shelved that way, but at the time it was placed with adult fantasy in the library. While a lot of it does now get stuck in YA, it was also prior to that being a "genre," and so it lacks a lot of the worst aspects of the recent/current YA booms. I also read a lot of stuff that was and is still considered adult. (And I'm grateful that my parents didn't put any restrictions on my reading based on age.)

While I didn't read any classic lit on par with Moby Dick in elementary school, we did read books that started to introduce serious subjects, like the Holocaust, like systemic racism, like totalitarianism, etc. Even "children's literature" included those topics, and we discussed them in class.

When I read about book challenges now that say that those subjects are inherently inappropriate for teenagers, and should not even be hinted at until college or older, it just... breaks my brain a little. We started talking about those subjects as elementary students! We kept talking about them up through my honors and AP English classes in high school! What do you MEAN kids and teens must be "protected" from things even hinting at these subjects??

[olivermoss]

Moby Dick in 4th grade was a miserable experience for me.

I agree that difficult topics should be in schools and books, but I just vividly remember my history teach struggling because it was the other history teacher, for the older elementary kids, who usually taught the subject and this was his first time.

Teenagers, yeah, they can handle a lot. I hated that (I think now dead) trend of acting like young adults were a separate class needing special protection and shouldn't have to even interact with adult-adults. They need to be actually prepared for the world, not be told that morality is simple

[mistressofmuses]

I can only imagine. I think that's a challenge for a lot of adult readers who give it a go. Sounds like kind of a nightmare for 4th grade.

There is definitely something to be said about teachers needing to be prepared and capable of handling those discussions of serious topics. Ones that don't know how to approach those topics can make the whole thing worse. I think that should be part of becoming a teacher, knowing how to appropriately handle that sort of thing... but I also know that a lot of teachers can get shuffled from one grade to another without it being their choice. 1st and 6th grade are vastly different.

Ugh, unfortunately I still see a lot of that attitude. That teenagers/young adults are precious little babies who need to be wrapped in bubble wrap and protected from any mentions of icky bad difficult topics, and if an adult wants to even casually share a social space with them it must be NEFARIOUS. Neo-puritanism makes my skin crawl. It does zero favors to young adults to keep them sheltered and then throw them to the wolves. (Though then you do get the "so maybe we need to also shelter the 20 year olds, since they aren't ready for adulthood...")