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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 3112469" data-attributes="member: 5171">No, of course not. I also don't have publisher parents with contacts throughout the industry to hawk my book for me as a birthday present.I wrote novels in the 8th grade. I could have written even more if I didn't have to go to school. That didn't make them good novels, mind you, but neither does having your parents publish it for you.The entirety of the hook for the series is "Look, he's only 15, and this isn't that bad!" He's the Charlotte Church of fantasy publishing. And yeah, I'm biased against that. I'm biased against "Hey, this is pretty good for a 15-year-old," because the great thing about writing is that it's a level playing field. You are as good as you are, regardless of whether you're young, old, rich, poor, a high-school drop-out or an Ivy League graduate. To imply that one should overlook bad writing and a bad plot because of the writer's age is insulting to the writer as well as the reader.I've got a friend who went into a diabetic coma in the middle of writing her current novel. That was kind of a big wake-up call for her (she'd been undiagnosed until this happened -- late onset Type 1). I'm sure it affected her writing. I'm equally sure that if the book jackets were hawking her book as "Impressive, especially considering that the author is a young woman just diagnosed with diabetes!", she'd be pretty insulted.There's an old saying that as an author, you have to write a million words of garbage before you really become a writer. I don't know how true that is, but I do know that I'm really glad that the four or five novels I wrote before age 22 will never see the light of day. (That said, the author, sad as he is, can walk around in a jacket made entirely of hundred dollar bills, so I'm sure he's okay.)I'm not saying that nobody should read this book. I'm not saying that the book shouldn't have been published. I read a great deal of fiction that I can objectively qualify as bad. (I usually call it popcorn, because that lets me look at myself in the mirror.) But I don't try to put it up on a pedestal. It's bad. It's not a unique novel with clunky writing, and it's not a strong retelling of the classic tropes. It's not new, and it's not good. The appeal is pretty much to people who want more Terry Brooks, or to people who are impressed by the fact that a 15-year-old can type.</blockquote>

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