crunch time for cute corruption
What do we read when we're in a mess? I've fingers crossed that young adults will, as their parents downsize their Prada pouches and call time on pedicures for the under 12s, suddenly find the 'cute corruption', to steal from and paraphrase Naomi Wolf in the New York Times a year or two ago, SO last week and turn, with relief, to historical fiction. If things are bad now, consider Yolanda's plight in Blue Flame or Raimon's in White Heat. When perspective is needed, blood and guts (in both senses of the latter word) beat gloss'n'goss any time.
The reaches of the global financial collapse really could call time on the pink books, as I call them, with the loss of Daddy's bonus severely diminishing the fathomless financial liquidity so crucial to the lives of Gossip Girl, A list and Clique characters, to say nothing of their legions and legions of kitty-katty-copy-catters. When everybody has to shop at Walmart and make do with last year's mobile phone, it may become cooler to identify with Meg or Jo March than with Blair Waldorf.
Dream on! Though we are doing the bailing, the bankers still seem to be banking. It will be some time before the Prada pouch shrinks, if it ever does. Reassured or enraged? I swither, sometimes quite violently, between the two.
posted by K.M.Grant @ 8:59 AM
3 Comments:
I would read one of your books any day rather than a "pink book". I'm just waiting for your latest book to come out in America.
Reading historical fiction is a way for young people (and oldsters) with NO SENSE of history realize that our present level of "discomfort" certainly is not proportional with real suffering in centuries past.
If history classes and textbooks do not inspire, then historical fiction DOES allow us a chance to walk and live in another time.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could learn something from history that we could apply to our futures?
If nothing else, this financial crisis the world seems to be falling into is just another fantastic reason to pick up a book.
Book are cheap entertainment (at least the paperbacks), which can teach you so much more than other, more popular things.
And really, you can always fall into a book. You can curl up with one by the fire. Can you honestly do that with a laptop or a television?
Can't wait for your next book to be published in the US.
Thanks
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