This morning (morning for me :p) I was going through my list of the blogs I follow and came across a title that called my attention. It was a post @ The Story Siren, of one of my favourite book blogs out there, that was named "The Dark Side (of Blogging)". So I read it. And couldn't believe what it said.
Someone had had the brilliant idea of sending Kristi a hate mail, telling her she was a bit old to be reading YA, and that she was getting a lot of books, which she shouldn't cause she already had so many, so please, "save some for the rest of us". And that she had to stop blogging and give teen bloggers a chance at getting heard.
Um, hello. I am a teen, I'm 17, and I can guarantee that I get heard. If I want to I can make anyone hear me. Another thing, I love YA Lit, and I don't think I'll stop reading it in a few years, when I'm 30, or 46. If I like a genre, I'll read it. Period.
Like Maggie Stiefvater said on her blog today:
- There's no "this is right for this age." "this is wrong for this age."
- There's this: "This book is right for me." "This book isn't my thing."
Scrolling down on her blog, I realized she had 220 comments (so far), and that not all of them were nice and supportive.
This comment really stroke me:
Look at that last sentence, saying Kristi's review on Immortal was incorrect. This tells me that I'm right assuming "Lena" is what I said earlier.
"This is not Lena. We are the ones that sent the letter. You all are just desperate to put a label so you assume that this is Lena when it is not.
Story Siren is a selfish, greedy bitch that shouldn't review books. She doesn't know anything about young adult books and her reviews are a failure. Teen bloggers deserve YA books more than she does. Publishers are idiots for sending books to her when the majority of the people that read the books are teenagers.
She is also very petty to put that post up just to get people to defend her. Her review on Immortal is incorrect and she is purposely giving bad reviews because she knows that all her dumb followers will listen to her and not read the book."
You want to know what I think of this? I think these "Anons" (if you had a bit of decency you'd comment with your name, or at least a fake one) have nothing -nothing- better to do, and I'm sure they wanted to draw so much attention to themselves like they are doing, so that this could become a Book Blogging Battle between Kristi's Army and The Anons.
So, I'm not going to pay anymore attention to these people.
Kristi, you shouldn't either. You rock. Period.
Love,
4 monkey thought (s):
It's just insane is what it is. There have been some other attacks on book bloggers when they gave a specific book a not-so-positive review (the first that comes to mind is Persnickety Snark and the guy who was attacking her over her Wings review) - this is just the first one I have seen on so grand a scale.
Now while there might be some book bloggers who get more ARCs etc. than they might deserve/can handle at any one time, and might appear as greedy, but The Story Siren is most certainly not one of them.
It's hard work reading as many books as she does and writing all those reviews, and she does so many other things as well.
I'm so stinking behind on my reading of other blogs... I'm so glad you posted this link in FB otherwise I may have missed it, and that would have been bad.
Anyway, I just want to say that I agree with you and Catherine both 100%. The Story Siren is a quality YA book blog. The fact that she is an experienced reviewer of the genre should weigh a lot heavier than her age. I'd go as far as calling her an expert on the genre, I mean, look at all of the stories she has read.
If age were truly a factor, then I wouldn't be reviewing YA books, 'cause I'm sure that I'm older than Kristi. And, all of my friends who read read YA, and we're rapidly encroaching on 30... so these Anons are a little off-base with their statistics. Adults often choose YA over "adult" lit because it is more fun and is less taxing with less heavy themeage (yeah, I made that word up...)
So, I say, "preach on" to you, Ella, and Maggie too. YA is for everyone.
Also, I just want to say that though I am not a fan of the In My Mailbox trend, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. Just because I don't like something doesn't mean that I should rain on its party if you know what I mean... you like it, you do it. It's all about freedom of intellect.
Great, thoughtful post!
Something that struck me earlier today was that maybe Anon is Gillian Shields cuz I find it odd how upset Anon is over this one review of Immortal and keeps bringing it up as an example of how Kristi no longer understands the teen mind, despite the fact that she gives tons of YA books 4 or 5 stars.
But I could be wrong about that. *shrugs*
It's horrible what people say *shakes head*.
I remember reading that post and was just flabbergasted, seriously, that is just horrible!
The Story Siren is one amazing book blogger...they should NOT be saying those things!
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