The first and most adamant advice I’ve gotten from other writers is: DON’T READ REVIEWS unless someone checks them first. Save your sanity, they said, and stay away from Goodreads and elsewhere. And after a terrible decision to read an early review of TNWT (bad, bad, idea.) I’ve put on blinders and ran the other way if something had even the slightest hint of being a review.
And then this weekend–this review by Geoff Whaley is so great–his post made my day. It feels amazing to have someone see what you were trying to put down on paper.
Here’s an exerpt:
The freakiest part of the novel was Kerr’s prescience of where the world currently is when she wrote this book. It was eerie as hell reading about “One Mile Cough” and its repercussions on the world in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic! I’m writing this a bit after I finished the novel so some of the details are a bit hazy, but basically this disease/pandemic started and…took over the world leaving very few people behind and those that are behind have to fight for survival. And then if you add in what I can only assume is some sort of precognitive knowledge of the cultural phenomena that is Tiger King (Wikipedia link), I’m dead.
“Pip had only been to Cat Tails once on a field trip in third grade. The place styled itself as a retirement home meets game preserve for ex-circus cats and other predators stupidly kept as pets. There were lions, tigers, and bears . . . oh my. She sincerely hoped no one had been rash enough to let out the inmates of the wildlife refuge.” (141)
Like come on Kerr, quit travelling to our future and telling us what’s going to happen. It’s creepy (but also really well written).