[ SECRET POST #3256 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3256 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[The Man From U.N.C.L.E.]


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[Ace Attorney]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 010 secrets from Secret Submission Post #465.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: This book pissed me off so badly, I have to rant about it

[(Anonymous)]

Sarah Jio's terrible Goodnight, June, has a nice premise: the protagonist, a hardassed New York City banker, inherits an awesome children's bookstore from her great-aunt and decides to bring the store back from the brink of financial ruin. In the process, she discovers her great-aunt's correspondence with Margaret Wise Brown, and that the bookstore was the inspiration for Brown's book Goodnight, Moon.

The bright spot in the protagonist's crappy childhood was the cool great-aunt and the days she spent in Auntie's wonderful bookstore. Protag's ditzy, hard-partying mom was never home, leaving protag and her sister (at the ages of 8 and 4) to look after themselves until great-aunt swooped in and rescued them.

And then Protag discovers that the mom who did such a bad job of caring for her is actually her first cousin. Her bio-mom is the bookstore-owning aunt. Protag is the product of Auntie's affair with the married man who gifted her with the bookstore. (The affair is okay because we're assured that the cheated-on wife is a loathsome person who only cares about money and status.) When Auntie's lover died before their daughter was born, Auntie, fearing that her lover's wife would try to kidnap Baby Protag, gave Protag to her niece to raise.

Except niece was all of 20 at the time. Plus, Auntie's older sister (the niece's mom) had died when the niece was 13, so niece had had to bring up her younger siblings--without any help from Auntie, apparently. And then Auntie foisted another baby on Niece to raise by herself, then blamed her for making a mess of it.

This is the happy ending, and apparently it is not supposed to change the reader's early impression that Auntie was a wonderful, warm, wise person.

Oh, and there's the part where protag comes to share Auntie's conviction that the bookstore must be saved because otherwise children will turn to the big, bad internet, and the internet is the enemy of reading and children can only learn to love stories by reading books.

Also, the author cannot do math. The book is set in 2000 (but mentions iPads) and supposedly Protag is 35, but we keep being told that Protag was born in 1975. And supposedly Auntie was 46 years old at that time--but that means that in 1946, when she was exchanging letters with Margaret Wise Brown, she was 17. And had already finished college and was up to managing a bookstore singlehandedly. It also means that her married lover, who was in his 60s when he died, was almost 20 years older than she was.

Re: This book pissed me off so badly, I have to rant about it

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. OK, that does sound ridiculous.

Re: This book pissed me off so badly, I have to rant about it

[(Anonymous)]

In fairness, it came from a Little Free Library (so no money was lost, only several hours of my life) and it was an Advance Review Copy, so maybe some of the chronology issues were cleaned up when it finally went to press. But the part where we're supposed to still think Auntie is wonderful when she actually treated her teenage niece horribly--I'm guessing that stayed in.

Re: This book pissed me off so badly, I have to rant about it

[caerbannog]

That's...pretty ridiculous yeah. I'd rant too if I read the whole thing lol.

Re: This book pissed me off so badly, I have to rant about it

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, that sounds terrible. A lot of books suffer from a lack of decent editing these days, and I'm not even talking about self-published books. Traditionally published books don't seem to get the thorough once-over they used to get, that's for sure.

Honestly, a book this bad... I wouldn't have given it to a Little Free Library. No need to inflict that nonsense upon an unsuspecting reader.

Re: This book pissed me off so badly, I have to rant about it

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of people do seem to have loved it, so maybe they fixed some of the timeline issues at least. But...ugh. Even the people who disliked it fixated mostly on how predictable and cliché-ridden it was, and nobody seemed to notice that Cool Auntie was not really as lovely a person as author wanted us to think.

Oh, and I forgot that Protag finds out that her aunt has died weeks after the fact from Auntie's lawyers, because she hasn't called Auntie (who has supposedly meant so much to her) in months. And it just slipped her cousin-mom's mind to call and let her know. Of course cousin-mom is supposed to be a ditz, but who is that much of a ditz?