BURN BRIGHT - Australian dystopian/fantasy YA novel you MUST read

A couple months ago, I came across BURN BRIGHT by Marianne de Pierres on Goodreads. The cover drew me in, and the blurb made me obsess. I had to have this book, and I had to have it NOW. It was the kind of book for which I would have immediately driven 45 minutes to the nearest Borders to purchase. The only problem?

It isn't available in the US.

So I e-mailed the author, begging her to tell me when it would be available. She said they were working on it, but in the meantime I ought to enter a podcast contest. So I entered the contest, similarly begging the people running it to choose me as one of the winners because I am not from Australia and do not have access to Australian books that aren't available worldwide or in this country.

The Book Goddess was smiling on me that day, because I won a copy of the book.

I got it in the mail a month later (shipping halfway around the world takes a looooong time, and I looked at my mail EVERY DAY for an entire month hoping it would be there, even long before I knew it would be).

Have you ever known you'd love a book even before you read it? I had that. Rather than my high expectations disappointing me, they were met and exceeded. I rushed through BURN BRIGHT in a matter of days, taking it with me wherever I went and burying my nose in it every second of downtime I had in my day.

BURN BRIGHT is a tantalizing blend of dystopia and fantasy, telling the story if Ixion, a land of ever-night and everlasting parties with mysterious absolute rules and dark creatures lurking just outside of the lighted paths. Ixion seems like a paradise to the teens who live in the dystopian world outside of it, but once the protagonist, Retra, gets there, she sees that Ixion hides things potentially more dangerous than the world from which she ran away. And the two worlds are more connected than any of the teens could have suspected.

I will probably pay however much it costs to have a book shipped from Australia when the sequel, ANGEL ARIAS, comes out later this year. (I think it's like $30). I'm that desperate for it.

So why am I posting on my blog about a book most of you can't access (not even on Kindle)? The author wants it to be available in the US and other countries, but she needs our help. If it sounds like something you might be interested in reading, blog about it, and like the facebook page. That's why I'm writing this blog. I'm a US reader who LOVED the book, and I really think other US readers would love it, too. Do you hear me US foreign rights people?

I WOULD have a contest to give away my copy... but no. A) I like it way too much and will probably want to re-read it several times, and B) it's signed and personalized ;)

In defense of genre fiction

Today I found myself in a type of conversation I do not like one bit. That conversation revolved around the perceived dichotomy in quality between genre fiction and literary fiction, with the emphasis, of course, on the idea that literary fiction is and always will be of higher quality (in every imaginable way) than genre fiction. Genre fiction is, apparently, riddled with cliches--cliches in prose, cliches in characters, cliches in plot. Even when it gets showy or bloated, at least literary fiction is trying to do something new. We don't want to lose innovation in the craft of writing.

The implications of that statement are false and close-minded. Of course we want innovation in our craft, but in what world is innovation limited to the strictly literary? Somehow it came out that if genre fiction keeps winning on the bestseller lists over literary fiction, we'll lose something important--innovation--in craft, and that would be so very regrettable.

Really.

Literary fiction may be doing a different kind of innovation, something that perhaps pushes the boundaries of the way stories are structured and words are used farther than genre fiction does, but make no mistake: genre fiction is innovative as well. I believe genre fiction is innovative in translating complicated ideas about human nature and human emotion and the human condition into something visceral. Genre fiction is constantly exploring how to create characters that readers can empathize with and relate to, and to give readers that experience of being inside someone's particular condition. It's an invaluable experience, because often it asks us to think about what it's like to be a person we'd otherwise never have occasion to wonder about. To say the characters in genre fiction are stock characters, cliches and cardboard cutouts, is doing it a great disservice. I'd argue that because genre fiction presents itself in a straightforward way, it's easier to arrive at the empathy with a character--but that doesn't remove any of the rewarding experience of reading a truly well-crafted character.

Another criticism of genre fiction is its heavy reliance on plot, as though plot is the literary version of candy and has no real value. Let's make no mistake here: all that literature everyone reads all the time? Most of those works have plots. Dickens? Plot. Austen? Plot. Shakespeare? Plot. Milton? Plot. Do they have other things, too? Of course they do--often times the best literature uses plot to enhance the other goals of the piece. But to me that only seems to serve as an endorsement of plot. I realize I'm watering this down, but my point is this: plot is not some literary cavity that ruins a book. It can be done well or screwed up just as anything can, but it's not a good reason to decide that genre fiction isn't worth anything. I understand that a lot of people like literary fiction for its attempt at realism but seriously, art does not have to mimic life.

I realize I'm going on and on, so I'll limit myself to one final example. Fantasy. People write fantasy off all the time, but I don't think they realize how hard it is to craft an entire world from your imagination. Fantasy writers aren't innovative? This is going to sound combative, but I would really encourage anyone who thinks fantasy is somehow less of a genre because it's so outside the realm of the ordinary to actually try making a new world. It isn't easy figuring out where characters get their tea and how advanced a country's navy is and whether the economic health of a place is good or bad (and in what way?) and what kind of underwear people sport and how many gods and goddesses they worship and how many months does their calendar have. Fantasy writers are so often trying to make new fantasy worlds that haven't been seen before. Forgive me, but I forget what that is called. Could it be... innovation?

Genre fiction writers may not be messing with form and words in such obvious ways as literary fiction writers do, but genre fiction writers also seek to grow as artists and to find new craft avenues. If you think that literary fiction is necessarily better than genre fiction, then you really need to revise your criteria for judging quality.

What's REALLY holding you back?

Karen Mahoney posted a link to this really fabulous entry by Theodora Goss a couple weeks ago, and I've read it several times since. I think it's wonderful.

http://theodoragoss.com/2011/02/15/value-yourself/

No amount of time spent writing, revising, querying, responding to critiques, craft-honing, dancing naked under the full moon in a circle of mushrooms is worth it if you don't think YOU are worth it.