{"id":466,"date":"2006-10-29T17:16:52","date_gmt":"2006-10-29T17:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=466"},"modified":"2024-02-23T21:17:59","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T02:17:59","slug":"november_sharyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2006\/10\/november_sharyn\/","title":{"rendered":"November, Sharyn, ed., Firebirds<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a tentative thesis after reading Firebirds<\/cite>, an anthology edited by Sharyn November<\/strong> that’s made up of original fantasy and science fiction and meant for a YA audience: one of the main failure modes of short fiction is didacticism. That is, when a short story doesn’t work, my reaction tends to be “Oh look, A Message” or, less often, “oh look, a story where nothing happens.” I don’t know if YA stories are more prone to didacticism than others, but a number of the stories in Firebirds<\/cite> that didn’t quite work for me also seemed to have A Message. To be clear, the existence of the didacticism isn’t usually why the stories don’t work for me; it’s that the characters, plot, or prose didn’t grab me enough to outweigh the didacticism.<\/p>\n

I don’t have much to say about the stories that weren’t bad, but didn’t grab me, and also seemed to have something of A Message, so I’ll just list them with brief descriptions:<\/p>\n