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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Dec 17, 2020 12:40:08 GMT -5
I completed the Max Einstein - Book 1. I can say that I liked it. But there is still something here that bothers me. Since the subject is books that are inspired by ASOUE, I think I have the right to make comparisons. So, while ASOUE the story happens in a world of make-believe, here things happen in the real world. But oddly enough, my suspension of disbelief is broken several times in Max Einstein's book. She is incredible, but she is almost perfect. Her only flaw seems artificial. Another problem is the secondary characters that are not captivating. The main villain does not appear to be a real danger. I liked, however, "el diablo" a really scary and very realistic villain. The only person who actually acts like a person. The others just look like characters. I can't explain it properly. But I felt that I was in an amusement park, where all dangers are controlled and artificial. Don't get me wrong ... I like amusements parks, and I think the purpose of the book was to get children to feel at an amusement park while learning important lessons. If the danger and emotion of the book stole all the attention of young readers, they would never pay attention and fix the educational part of the book. So I can say that the book does what it promises, especially by taking the reader on trips around the world. On the other hand, at ASOUE, I don't feel safe at any time. The lessons learned are not the kind you learn at school. And all the characters have defects that make them very credible to me.
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Post by R. on Dec 31, 2020 18:34:16 GMT -5
I agree with you on most of those things, but could you really say that Max was any more perfect than Violet, for instance? They both have some flaws, but a lot less than most people. In every story, there needs to be someone who is at least somewhat likeable, and as a protagonist they both need to be somewhat superior to the average human being in order to be the heroes and someone the reader can look up to.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Dec 31, 2020 19:05:59 GMT -5
I want you to understand that it is difficult for me to criticize asoue. I have an emotional attachment to asoue, and I can't make a fair judgment. It's been more than a decade of my life liking asoue. (I think two decades). And by the time I started reading asoue, I didn't have a keen taste for characters. If I started reading asoue today, I would probably see Violet, Klaus and Sunny with different eyes. But now they are my friends. Max is a newcomer to me. So it's an unfair comparison. But I can try, of course. When I say that Max's defects seem to be forced, I refer to the fact that the narrator needs to explain them. The narrator says: "Max doesn't know how to deal with organization very well". The narrator decided that this would be her defect, and she stresses that, instead of the author actually allowing to include in the story a moment when it really becomes a reality. I believe that good pisciological narration does not need to state "the character is like this". He needs to describe what she thinks. I liked the picicological narrative involving the inner Einstein. That was interesting, and it didn't seem forced. But the moments when the narrator describes Max's mistakes, it seems that he was looking at a "how to create a character" booklet and there it said: "your character needs to have some defect", and he then decided to put the narrator to literally state what's her defect. This is different from Lemony Snicket's narration. Well, Lemony's narration is a narration from the point of view of a character, and not from an omniscient narrator. Lemony would have the "right" to describe their imperfections directly. But even Lemony avoids doing that. Because it doesn't look good, at least not from my point of view. Let me compare with Agatha Cristie. It's not children's literature, but it's still a good benchmark, and it's something I like. When Agatha wrote Miss Murple's first case, she did not need to put the narrator to explicitly describe Miss Murple's moral flaws. It is best to describe the events in which these flaws are evident, or the opinion of other characters about those flaws. And not only about failures ... The whole characterization of the character's psychology is not good, from my point of view, when the narrator needs to say: "the character is humble, he's brilliant, he cares about others." In Max's case, all of their positive characteristics were worked out very well, and were evident in the story without the narrator literally having to say: "Max is the most intelligent human being on the planet." But in the case of failures ... that sounded artificial from my point of view.
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Post by B. on Jan 1, 2021 3:41:46 GMT -5
Ever heard of paragraph breaks?
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Post by R. on Jan 1, 2021 3:43:47 GMT -5
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Post by B. on Jan 1, 2021 13:40:25 GMT -5
Not insulting, just wondering tbh
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