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)]

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)]

Though in seriousness, that's the first thing in this book that's really pissed me off. Is it too much to ask authors like this to stop treating black characters like props to make them look edgy and cool. Can you not take one minute to think "hm, if I had been on holiday and cut it short to see my (white) sister in law whose son had just been accused of murder, what would I say?" and realise that it would NOT be that???

There's something very dehumanising about it but I struggle to put it into words. Depth for me but not for thee, I suppose.

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

[(Anonymous)]

(kind of comical to compare anything in this book to purple hibiscus, but can't help but note the contrast with the scenes in there in which lots of characters talk shit about oyinbo, and it *adds* to the book because it is black ppl talking to *each other* in a casual context where OF COURSE that would come up. Whereas this reads like a white author's bad imitation of stupid things they have seen on twitter.)

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

[(Anonymous)]

Now a man is wisecracking at his sister about his sex life, like you do.

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

[(Anonymous)]

https://imgur.io/7EhspYM?r

oh fuck oh no oh fuck no

(The page before this also has a scenario that makes fuckall sense, but idk if I can be bothered to get into it. But I HAD to show you all this page, for obvious reasons.)

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

[(Anonymous)]

(narrator is the tim)

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

[(Anonymous)]

This sounds like something the TRAs would accuse women on the Big O of doing while secretly, desperately wishing they were invited themselves.

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

[(Anonymous)]

DD

I think these are a real thing. At least, I’ve overheard a woman irl talk about throwing one for her daughter. The daughter wasn’t present; I worry she was being held hostage somewhere.

The bigger wtf for me is how they describe a party without guys. I *enjoy* low-key parties where you sit around chatting, but this description makes it sound so lifeless and sad.

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

[(Anonymous)]

I see them take in my pencil skirt and silk blouse, my blazer and heels. "Why do you look like a sexy librarian?" my brother asks.

🤸

Everyone in this book is pornbrained beyond repair.

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

[(Anonymous)]

tim confirmed to have committed rape-by-deception against asher, not that anyone in the world of this book has so far suggested there is anything wrong with that. I still feel bad for tim because his mother got his dick cut off at some point while he was a minor. (She took him to "Dr Powers"; such a subtle disguise!) The book has hit the halfway mark so now it's abandoned all pretense of narrative and is just giving paragraphs of mermaids propaganda; I won't bore you with them.

I'm cackling over how this book will age, though.

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

[(Anonymous)]

Selena shows up again, makes another comment about white people, and brings juneteenth up out of nowhere. This character is legit the most racist caricature I've encountered in a while.

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

[(Anonymous)]

Now she's lecturing on the unfairness of the justice system, and the mother's relative privilege. Tbf I think a lot of what she's saying is stuff that a woman in her position would *think*. But not say out loud. Unless she was a fucking psychopath. I am just going to tell myself that Selena is supposed to be a fucking psychopath.

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

[(Anonymous)]

Oh hey, nonnies, it gets even better!

There's a strange calm about Maya. She's what my mother would call an old soul. I wonder if growing up as an Asian girl, the daughter of two mothers, in this very white, very straight world of Adams is what's given her a kind of resilience, a kind of wisdom.

This book has everything.

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)]

Okay, there is one good detail in this book. After the mother leaves her abusive husband, she sleeps with some guy she isn't attracted to, just to make sure that her abusive husband isn't the last person she ever fucks. So, congratulations, it took 147 pages to get there, but there is a worthwhile paragraph at last.

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

[(Anonymous)]

The narrator reflects that even if vandals smashed every jar of her honey, that would be better than her child dying. The fact that she thinks this is something she needs to clarify makes me wonder if this book was actually written by winne the pooh.