Sunday, September 11, 2016

Kanye West Owes Me $300: & Other True Stories From A White Rapper Who Almost Made It Big, Jensen Karp

I ran into Jensen Karp because I listened to his Bachelor podcast (now defunct) although I guess I should have run into him 10 years ago when I was paying a lot of attention to Pete Wentz. (Let's be serious: I was/am always paying more attention to Patrick Stump.)

So this is the story all about how his life got flipped -- turned upside-down. Sorry. I'll stop. In college Karp used his obsession with rap and rap battles to become a famous rap-battler on local L.A. radio, which led to a music deal with Interscope, which was eventually shelved because Interscope also represented Eminem and seemed to feel they could only promote one white rapper.

The joy of the book is all the run-ins he had with famous people, and since we're about the same age, I loved all his stories. I want to hear about pre-fame Kanye, and Sisqo, and Fred Durst, and Mark McGrath, and the Justin-Britney dance-off, and Suge Knight. I was obsessed with a lot of the same pop-culture Karp was, only he met all these people and I was in college watching TRL.

The flip side is that Karp didn't deal well with losing out on fame; he was already depressed because of his parents' divorce and his father's cancer, and the end of the book is a little bit emotionally brutal. As a reader, it feels like he never totally believed his rap career was going to happen (the lyrics he includes are always jokey) and when it fizzled out he just collapsed. But I get it -- I've queried a novel, gotten great feedback and talked to editors and agents, and then had them say, "Oh, you know what, this just isn't... quite... Good luck in the future!" and then collapsed in on myself and wanted to go hide for months and/or years. I'm delicate, and it's hard. And I didn't even have a pen name that's an awkward sex act from urban dictionary.

I highly recommend this book if you want some great stories about the rap scene in the early 2000s, or if you want a rise-and-fall fame story that won't crush your soul forever (just make you a little sad). I just wish he'd explained how he met Pete Wentz.

Grade: B
#70 in 2016

Saturday, September 10, 2016

A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah J Maas

There is a trope in YA fiction, where the heroine's arc is to learn about the world and how people (or aliens, or fairies, or vampires) aren't the way she assumed they were, and she's going to have to grow up and realize everyone can be good or bad. A lot of the book is her assumptions, and her finally realizing how wrong she is. And there is another trope in romance, where the heroine hates the hero for some reason, and just when she's starting to thinks he likes him, she overhears part of a conversation that seems to confirm all the things that make her hate the hero. Then she runs away, and then dumb terrible stuff happens to her.
Neither of these tropes are bad; they just aren't my favorites. I'd always rather have a clever heroine, and a romance where the tension of "will they or won't they?" is built on actual problems rather than overheard, imagined ones. So this book wasn't my favorite, because to some extent it's built around both these tropes. The romance also felt a little.... Well, he's handsome, and he's nice, so now she LOVES HIM, even though he represents everything she always thought she hated. And he loves her for no reason I ever totally understood (she's not that nice, and she's not that smart). Of course, some of that gets explained with a twist toward the end, but it still felt a little unearned.
I really liked parts of the book. Feyre is a human, and she kills a faerie so her family won't starve to death. Then another faerie comes for revenge, and rather than murder her, demands she come live with him forever instead. (Yes, it's Beauty and the Beast.) She haaaaaates faeries, and spends a lot of the book plotting escape, and being a huge brat to someone who is instantly only nice to her (for reasons that are explained later, in fairness to the book). Eventually a Thing happens, I won't ruin the twist, but she has to go rescue him, because now she LOVES him, and to do that she has to survive a bunch of trials and solve a riddle. I bet you could solve the riddle even if I don't tell you the riddle, but sure, okay; it's a YA book.
The problem was that by the time we got to Feyre standing up to the evil queen, I didn't believe she was smart enough to survive the traps set for her, or to bargain her way out of tricky faery deals. And frankly -- she's mostly not. She solves the brute force puzzle okay, but needs help to solve the thinking puzzles, makes terrible deals, and only solves the obvious riddle on the verge of death. She's bad at rescuing; she isn't even plucky and stubborn and determined. By the end she's sadly resigned to lose and die.
Oh, and there's what I think is going to be a love triangle in the sequel, which might be the dumbest love triangle I've read in years. (There is an evil faery who is dark and beautiful and saves her, but ONLY FOR HIS OWN SELFISH REASONS, or did he, or does he have SECRET FEELINGS??????? This subplot features a lot of sexual harassment, and being saved from sexual harassment, and although he has a reason, I didn't like it.)
I think I really really would have liked this if I were younger; the heroine rescuing the hero from the evil person who has stolen him away to be her consort is a great twist on a fairy tale. But Feyre just wasn't the kind of heroine who I like reading about, and so for me, this book wasn't great.
Grade: C
#69 in 2016