My daughter’s been home sick for the last two days, so she’s been reading up a storm. She’s come out with some pithy comments along the way, including:
About John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars: “Why would you write a romantic novel, and give your character a completely romantic name like Augustus, and then have people call him Gus? Gus is NOT romantic at all.”
About parents: “Writers have to be really creative to get rid of parents. Either they kill them, or they make the main characters sixteen or seventeen and super independent. In this book I’m reading [Since You’ve Been Gone, by Morgan Matson], the parents are screenwriters and they get really into new projects and then only leave the living room every forty-eight hours to see if their kids are alive.”
About embossed covers: “I love textured books. I wish they were a person, so I could marry them.”
And that’s the word from the sickbed. You’re welcome.
Bless her. Yes, we do need to come up with ideas of how to get rid of the parents. And I agree, Gus is not a very romantic name. I used to love being sick so I could stay home and read when I was a kid.
Me too! My mother-in-law said that when she was a child, her family used to have a comforter embroidered with nursery rhymes, and it was only allowed out when one of the kids was sick — that’s what they would read. 🙂