Eighth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

The creepy jock hits on tim. Presumably he'll lash out later, when he learns tim is tim, and then later still he'll see the error of his ways and they'll become best buds. (Oh yeah, forgot to say, I think the author thinks the reader will be surprised that the character is a tim; it hasn't been said overtly yet. So I could still turn out to be wrong! But I'm not wrong.)

(tim himself is quite a likeable character so far, by this book's standards. He doesn't do anything other than be sad and state incorrect facts about music in that way autistic characters in books do. So it is possible to read this as a psychological horror about munchie parents if one wants, and indeed may be the copium I resort to to get through it. Interesting that author is agp man and character is hsts kid. Not gonna write about a 44yo straight man, guys?)

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

The sheer prose-quality of this book is breathtaking:

Nobody is a do-over of anybody else, and if you get to do anything at all on earth it's live your own life, not be some sort of ghost version of somebody else's.

I can't handle the TRUTH and POWER of this book.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

tim sees block of butcher's knives and thinks "hm, maybe?". He has slit his wrists in the past. Just in case you thought there was a cliche that it avoided.

He also mentions wishing he could stay friends with his bf's mom if they break up. As you do.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Interlude to enjoy this fabulously backhanded back-cover endorsement, courtesy of Marie Claire, of all places!

There are writers who try and do what Picoult does, and then there's Picoult.

I agree, I agree.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Now asher is in police station. tim has been found in house covered in blood. i assume jock attacked him and everyone will assume it was asher? (or maybe even his father attacked! But that seems a bit ott even for picoult. So I assume jock tried to sexually assault him, then discovered he was male and attacked) tim taken to hospital. Asher talks to police, even though his mother is there and should be advising him to keep his mouth shut and get a lawyer. but she's too busy trying to be her kid's best friend, I guess, to be a good parent, so he just talks to the police in front of her and probably incriminates himself by accident.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Another dv scene. Feels like someone just typed "what do abusers do" into google and pasted it onto the page. To be fair, these guys often do have very similar playbooks. Still feels like chatgpt drew up the scene.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

"his eyes so red it looks as if all the blood vessels have burst"

See, if you just stuck to *a* blood vessel, the image would be fine, but ALL of them is just silly and turns it into a comedy novel.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

tim has died! :( Aw. what is it with shitty authors killing off the only halfway bearable characters.

Picoult is going for sad, of course. Unfortunately, her prose is so bad I cannot get through a sentence without giggling. "I hang up as a tsunami of sadness sinks me into a kitchen chair." "It doesn't
stop, this waterfall of pain. It comes pouring out of him" interspersed with some shit about bees.

(I also suspect the detail of her comforting her kid with the owl and the pussycat has been pinched from another, better book. I think I read it elsewhere recently. But maybe lots of people do that?)

to top it all off, tim's cello playing is described as stunning.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

So, your son's partner has just died. And this is how you narrate it:

"I bolt upright in bed, thinking of the bear that decimated my hive, and then the rest of the day fills in the empty spaces in my conscious mind."

This is the comedy novel I never knew I needed.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Friend suggests the twist will be that jkr is the killer. I wouldn't put it past these people.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

A flashback. Tim mansplains beekeeping to a beekeeper. other boy comments that the tim is "like Google", confirming my suspicions about the writing method.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

I am both hoping and disappointed that now it is focusing more on "kid accused of crime, parent worried for kid", it may be a bit less ridiculous.

The mother has fiiiinally decided it's not the best idea for her kid to talk directly to the police, at least.

Am wondering if picoult has any other plots, since the last thing of hers I read was "nurse falsely accused of murder; everyone else is a bigot". Seems to be her jam.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Oh fuck, started new chapter and I missed that the narrator changed from the mother, to son's gf. so I thought the mom was hanging out in a treehouse with her son and I was like "weird but okay, moms in this book are mad", and I only realized something was off when they started making out. D:

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

I think of Picoult books like Pringles. They’re absolute rubbish, but you can always read one, and you can always finish a whole can. They’re quite soothing when you just need something, and you can’t cope with anything complicated or involving decisions. You know what you’re getting.

It’s a bit like how teen me used to comfort-read Enid Blyton.

But I have chosen not to read this one.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

See this is it! I thought I was going to be getting entertaining trash with the odd good paragraph, so I figured I'd finish it in an afternoon and get it out of my house. But this one is uniquely crafted to be everything I DON'T want in a book. XDDDD If the others are pringles, this one's a packet of quavers. But tbh, pringles are better than her books. Maybe hers are more like the value bags from aldi. They're not good, but you can finish them, and they're not very big.

(Also, I usually don't really like the term "virtue signalling" bc I think people are usually just talking earnestly about what they value, but jeeeeeesus Picoult is one of the few people to whom I would apply it wholeheartedly.)

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

friend just described picoult as "the dhar mann of authors" and im dead

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

"Our dinner that night winds up being a bucket of KFC in the tree house. There are drumsticks and breasts and wings and little tubs of mashed potatoes and a carton of brown gravy."

Just in case you didn't know what was in a KFC bucket, and needed to know-- this book's got you covered.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

I will say, the idea at the heart of this book is a good one for a horror/thriller. Mother who escapes abuse fears she has raised her son to also be an abuser, and doesn't know what to believe. It's a shame it's so shittily told, but then I'm sure others have done it before and done it better, so doesn't matter too much that this particular telling is bad. I'm approx 1/5 through the book. Will it get good? Unlikely! But we shall see!

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

And immediately, another pointless bee interlude. I can't work out why the bees are so prominent in this book. Did they think it made it more literary?

Just passed a painfully cringe description of teens playing music. If you've read a Mary Sue play an instrument in a fanfic, you've read this scene. In general the book reads like at least one author is very smug that s/he knows the names of some instruments, and what a time signature is. I get the vibe the authors thought they were writing oscar-bait in novel form, which makes it all funnier.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

The teens discuss sex in front of the mother, because teens are well-known for wanting to discuss sex in front of their parents. Humans in general are well-known for that behaviour. These authors have definitely spent time with other humans before. Definitely.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Selena--as usual-- looks like she has stepped out of a magazine instead of taking a red-eye and driving to the farmhouse. She's dark-skinned and model-thin, wearing a crisp white shirt and high-waisted pin-striped trousers, with red suede booties. Her hair is shaved neatly to the scalp; she has giant gold hoops in her ears. Her lipstick matches her footwear. I could plan outfits for weeks and still not come off as put together as Selena does with virtually no effort.
[...]
"I'm sorry I ruined your vacation," I say.
Selena shrugs. "I hated Ireland anyway. Has to be the whitest damn place I've ever been, and I've lived in New Hampshire half my life."

a) booties?!!

b) that dialogue is the whitest damn dialogue I've ever seen.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

More bee sex. Then the narrator segues into her love life. At this point I assume one or both authors is a honeyfucker.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Oops! Forgot to link you all tim's anime cello of great power!

https://imgur.io/Izp3dMA?r

The way these authors write about music weirds me out. So many instruments and pieces on the page; SUCH an unmusical approach to it all.

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

Aced that sonata, bro! Crushed it!

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

lol this reads like someone learning a Guitar Hero song