![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Giving and Gratefulness.
Jan. 13th, 2005 09:30 amI just finished reading, in preprint, a book called _The Witch's Boy_, by Michael Gruber.
This book is coming out in hardcover, and doesn't deserve to be published at all.
Billed as YA fantasy, it will be (from the paper I found stuck in the back) given quite the marketing campaign.
Peg recently made a series of comments on why she does not like the book _The Giving Tree_. Well, this book exemplifies all the reasons that Peg cites for not liking _Giving Tree_, only it's hundreds of pages longer.
The 'protagonist', if you can call him such, is a deformed little boy taken in by a witch. The witch loses everything for the sake of the boy, yet he treats her, consistently and throughout the book-- until the last 20 pages!-- with a lack of gratitude. And she opens her arms to him again and again, giving in a love that seems destructive and barren to me, when what she should have done was taken the damn fool over her knee and given him a spanking.
Where the heck to people come up with this idea of mother's love being all giving and all caring and something that empties one out instead of enriching the lives of both the lover and the love-ee?
Where?
*bangs head against wall*
This book is coming out in hardcover, and doesn't deserve to be published at all.
Billed as YA fantasy, it will be (from the paper I found stuck in the back) given quite the marketing campaign.
Peg recently made a series of comments on why she does not like the book _The Giving Tree_. Well, this book exemplifies all the reasons that Peg cites for not liking _Giving Tree_, only it's hundreds of pages longer.
The 'protagonist', if you can call him such, is a deformed little boy taken in by a witch. The witch loses everything for the sake of the boy, yet he treats her, consistently and throughout the book-- until the last 20 pages!-- with a lack of gratitude. And she opens her arms to him again and again, giving in a love that seems destructive and barren to me, when what she should have done was taken the damn fool over her knee and given him a spanking.
Where the heck to people come up with this idea of mother's love being all giving and all caring and something that empties one out instead of enriching the lives of both the lover and the love-ee?
Where?
*bangs head against wall*
