Gemma Doyle

[farla]

I'm becoming more and more curious/suspicious of people's voting motivations. This one's managing to pull 40% of the vote, so I downloaded it to take a look. The first five chapters are
predictable and somewhat cliche, but there's really not much to talk about. What did people see in this that made them want to hear my thoughts on it so badly?

Comments

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

Not that I doubt you have that many readers, but the Doyle votes look almost bottish. Everything else has ten or twelve votes, and it has almost fifty.

I've never even heard of those books.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I'm not really sure how easy it is to game the poll, but I think most of them are legit because they seemed to be matching up a bit with the Darkest Powers ones, but not perfectly. I did get a weird burst of votes after I said I was thinking of not doing it, though.

[measuringlife.livejournal.com]

They totally wanted to hear about the lesbian subtext, of course.

...or I would presume.

I read it a bit ago as it was recced to me, but I'm, not sure if I'll ever get around to reading the rest. The magic system creeped the fuck out of me.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Ooh, magic system. I just saw a bunch of Gemma whining abut India, predictable intrigue, predictable sexism, Gemma whining about England.

[measuringlife.livejournal.com]

Yeah, after several more chapters of Gemma is in a Girl's School, they eventually start going to...this world. Or I should say, this dimension. However, there's a very dark side to this dimension, and despite how beautiful it seems at first, there's creepy entities in it and what it takes to have magical power was actually really quite dark.

I'm trying to think of a way to explain this without spoiling the book, but all I can say is a major plot point later was her forgiving her mother for a truly horrible thing her mother did in the past to gain powers in this dimension. It was surprisingly graphic for a YA novel series in that regard, at least.

[farla.livejournal.com]

......that is kind of an enormous spoiler, I'm halfway through and that hasn't even come up yet.

[measuringlife.livejournal.com]

Er, whoops? I thought I was vague enough for it to not go into spoiler territory, but I guess not. Sorry!

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's a vague statement, but not once you start reading the book. I already know about the weird powers, that there's some other place that's ominous, etc, but the mother's involvement hadn't been brought up yet.

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

Some people have bad taste in terrible books.

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's not so much the book is terrible as just pretty bland. I'm not sure what there is to talk about.

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

In my mind the terrible there is working kind of like a minus sign. Just as someone with bad taste in books might recommend a bad or mediocre book as good, someone with bad taste in terrible books might recommend a good or mediocre book as bad.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe because it's a fairly popular series, so a lot of people are familiar with it? I myself read the first book.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I guess? But there are/should be other factors than just that people know about it.