A Bitter Pill

“Bacon improved things dramatically.” Truth.

3.13 Bitterblue

This is the follow up to Graceling, taking place eight years later and following the search for truth of the new queen we met as a girl in Graceling.  I honestly was looking forward to it, and while I liked being back in the world, nothing much happened.

At 500-some pages, there is just far too much bloat going on.  New characters are introduced who are all too similar to one another and many unnecessary, story lines that start out interesting but don’t have any structure or follow through, and a mystery that is intriguing until it is wrapped up nicely with very actually little resolved.  In the end, it didn’t even feel like a completed story, just one long tale that meandered nowhere. (But I did love that Bitterblue said, “Balls,” a lot.  It is a favorite of mine.)

This is a big issue for me with the new YA landscape.  Once publishers figured out that kids would take on a long book, scarf it down, and still want more, everyone started to write every little thing they thought of and not edit it well.  And yes, readers love a long book to escape into, but it needs to be worth it in the end.  Not every book needs to be over 500 pages and part of a trilogy.  Sometimes a story is short and tight, sometimes questions are left unanswered, and sometimes it is worth the extra pages, but not always and certainly not as often as the current YA publishers seem to think.