It's a good thing I don't twitter and follow Demi Moore, because I may have had to post suicidal status updates after reading Living Dead Girl.
I know teens like depressing books. And, I know that bad things happen in the world, however, I am not sure why this book was necessary. I understand she was brainwashed, and afraid to run away from him because he would kill her and her parents. But, just how depressed does one need to get while reading a book?
I wonder if anyone reads this book and likes it. Actually, I'm going to look up book reviews for it right now... Ok people seem to like it. Then again, it's not like I disliked it so much as did not want to deal with the story it told.
This might be my English degrees speaking, (oh I knew that MA would come in handy one day,) but I generally split writing up a few ways. One is books that are "good" i.e well written, well crafted, plotted, thought out, whatever. And, books that I like. These "good" books I don't necessarily have to like, but that doesn't mean I will discount it for it's literary merit. For a few reasons, but most importantly, who the hell am I? I mean, I HATE Mark Twain, but I don't think I'm in a position to say that he was bad at what he did. Clearly, most people disagree with me. So, he's good I just don't like him. (This is probably something teens should learn, their opinion in terms of good and bad usually aren't important, how the author does it is sometimes more important that what they are saying...but that opens whole areas of lit critique and I'll bore myself if I go down that path.)
I'd say Living Dead Girl falls into the "good" category.
And, just to be thorough, I also have a classification of books that I like but are actually not particularly well written or provide any lasting literary value.
Dare I say it? TWILIGHT falls into this category.
And, now for my coup de grace, because I neglected to mention Twilight in my last blog.
Living Dead Girl is like Twilight, in that Alice (the name is the same, but that's too easy) is constantly worried she is going to do something wrong and get killed by Ray, these are fears that Bella has too.
Ugh, I feel dirty writing that and minimalizing the horrors that Alice went through, even if it's fiction, there are probably real-life situations that are far too similar. And, now I'm depressed again. Where's Demi Moore?