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Heck. I haven’t read much of Pale because it felt too humanly depressing. The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me. Whichever protagonist has the narcissistic but useless dad, I did not want to deal with that.
That said…I ended up thinking Twig was his best work, too. But I’d be more interested in seeing a post about all the reasons it works rather than the reasons Ward and/or Pale didn’t, if that makes sense. Partly so I can read it avoiding spoilers, partly because I think it will invite more interesting discussion and less bashing.
Interesting. I agree to an extent but then after a certain point I just write those characters off. Verona's dad became less of a character to me and more of an obstacle, so it was easy to mostly ignore all of his terrible behavior. Much worse to me is when the main characters make bad decisions.
I think the biggest reason is simply that the characters and dialogue got a LOT of attention. Pale seems to have better worldbuilding in many ways, and more interesting ideas, and a more coherent and interesting plot, as well as a more fleshed-out setting, so for those reasons I prefer it to Twig. Twig, though, did have an absolutely fantastic main character, with extremely engaging dialogue, motivations, and character growth throughout the story. I think it was simply the better-written story, it's just that it had less of what I want from a story (compelling ideas competently explored).
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A book review of Twig sounds kind of fun and might even be within my capabilities (I might have to reread it, so if I were to work on this it'd be a while before posting). And I agree more or less with
though my intention with critiquing his recent works would be to have something constructive, coming from a place of love, and most importantly IMO from a perspective I'm pretty sure he doesn't have in his life (could be totally wrong about that, don't know him personally and it is better to not assume stuff like that) that could be shared with him in a digestible, non-wordpress-comment format.
Agree, I think that accounts for approx. 40% of the problems I have with his recent stuff.
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