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koilungfish) wrote2010-03-29 02:31 pm
koilungfish) wrote2010-03-29 02:31 pm
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Run For Your Life by Barbara Holland
29/3/10 - Holiday
Title - Run For Your Life
Author - Barbara Holland
ISBN - 0-590-31629-X
Run For Your Life might claim to be about two children getting kidnapped, but it is actually about television. Boring, 1970s daytime television - commercials, game shows, soaps and all that jazz - and sitting around watching it for days on end.
The plot does actually have some potential, which is why it's been used so many times, mostly by Enid Blyton, but Ms Holland decides to forgo such possibilities as escape plans, rescue plans, kidnappers who actually do anything, kidnapped kids who actually do something ... no, as far as Ms Holland is concerned, the really important thing is to describe what everyone is watching on TV, in quite some detail, as in the above quote. Sometimes she even includes the dialogue.
Again we come back to that maxim, which I believe was first stated by Mark Twain: if there is something in a book that comes between the reader and the story, rip it out. In this instance, Ms Holland's editor should have ripped out about a third of the pages and sent the manuscript back with a little note suggesting she put something in other than three of the four main characters sitting at a kitchen table watching daytime TV.
It is entirely possible that Ms Holland wanted to describe the thoughts and emotions of a kidnapped young boy, and she does do a good job in some respects - the interaction of emotion and physical sensation, some good description of the landscape outdoors, of the disassociation of being kidnapped - but then she counters her good points with a thick slab of TV programming. This must have been part of a sticky story creation process - what was Ms Holland to have her kidnappers and kids do for the week they're together? Apparently all she could think of was watching TV.
Not that the kidnappers are particularly smart. Given a choice of rooms to store the kids in - kitchen with front door, empty room without front door, bedroom upstairs, lockable bedroom upstairs - they keep the kids in the kitchen right by the front door. Even to sleep. Why it takes the two children a week to come up with the idea of sneaking out the unlocked front door whilst their one guardian is fast asleep I cannot understand. They apparently did their food shopping on the way to the kidnapping and failed to plan for such minor essentials as a week's food as they did. Given the level of ineptitude - and both book and characters acknowledge these kidnappers are pretty stupid - the main implausibility is that it takes the children a week to escape.
There seems to be an attempt at a Message in this book. Mostly it seems to be TV Is Bad, since the story seems to be as much about escaping from the TV as it is from the kidnappers, yet one of the children got kidnapped specifically because he'd stopped watching TV and gone outside. Ms Holland's message seems rather muddled - possibly she was trying for a realistic balance of "It's okay to be brave, but don't be so brave you're stupid", but there seems to be interference from the TV.
All in all, there's a good kid's book about a realistic kidnapping scenario in here somewhere, but it's been intercut with a summary guide to 1970s daytime TV.
This book is:
* - about 70s daytime TV
* - for kids
* - passably written
This book is not:
* - about two kidnapped children
* - any good
* - in print
Author - Barbara Holland
ISBN - 0-590-31629-X
"A bunch of people were sitting in a waiting room in a hospital. A little girl with pigtails said, "But what is Mommy dies?" Then there were commercials, and then a pretty blond lady shot somebody in the back with a pistol, and he fell down dead. That looked as if it might be exciting, but it turned out she was only dreaming it or thinking about it."Run For Your Life aka Prisoners at the Kitchen Table was handed to me by a bee whose name will be censored to protect the guilty, and I don't know what I did to merit such an act, so I gave her a copy of The Power of the Serpent in return, thereby ensuring that I more than deserved what I got in the first place.
Run For Your Life might claim to be about two children getting kidnapped, but it is actually about television. Boring, 1970s daytime television - commercials, game shows, soaps and all that jazz - and sitting around watching it for days on end.
The plot does actually have some potential, which is why it's been used so many times, mostly by Enid Blyton, but Ms Holland decides to forgo such possibilities as escape plans, rescue plans, kidnappers who actually do anything, kidnapped kids who actually do something ... no, as far as Ms Holland is concerned, the really important thing is to describe what everyone is watching on TV, in quite some detail, as in the above quote. Sometimes she even includes the dialogue.
Again we come back to that maxim, which I believe was first stated by Mark Twain: if there is something in a book that comes between the reader and the story, rip it out. In this instance, Ms Holland's editor should have ripped out about a third of the pages and sent the manuscript back with a little note suggesting she put something in other than three of the four main characters sitting at a kitchen table watching daytime TV.
It is entirely possible that Ms Holland wanted to describe the thoughts and emotions of a kidnapped young boy, and she does do a good job in some respects - the interaction of emotion and physical sensation, some good description of the landscape outdoors, of the disassociation of being kidnapped - but then she counters her good points with a thick slab of TV programming. This must have been part of a sticky story creation process - what was Ms Holland to have her kidnappers and kids do for the week they're together? Apparently all she could think of was watching TV.
Not that the kidnappers are particularly smart. Given a choice of rooms to store the kids in - kitchen with front door, empty room without front door, bedroom upstairs, lockable bedroom upstairs - they keep the kids in the kitchen right by the front door. Even to sleep. Why it takes the two children a week to come up with the idea of sneaking out the unlocked front door whilst their one guardian is fast asleep I cannot understand. They apparently did their food shopping on the way to the kidnapping and failed to plan for such minor essentials as a week's food as they did. Given the level of ineptitude - and both book and characters acknowledge these kidnappers are pretty stupid - the main implausibility is that it takes the children a week to escape.
There seems to be an attempt at a Message in this book. Mostly it seems to be TV Is Bad, since the story seems to be as much about escaping from the TV as it is from the kidnappers, yet one of the children got kidnapped specifically because he'd stopped watching TV and gone outside. Ms Holland's message seems rather muddled - possibly she was trying for a realistic balance of "It's okay to be brave, but don't be so brave you're stupid", but there seems to be interference from the TV.
All in all, there's a good kid's book about a realistic kidnapping scenario in here somewhere, but it's been intercut with a summary guide to 1970s daytime TV.
This book is:
* - about 70s daytime TV
* - for kids
* - passably written
This book is not:
* - about two kidnapped children
* - any good
* - in print
no subject
But of course it indicates a government conspiracy! Or something. Blargh. I think they need to start teaching Occam's Razor in schools ... or just logic in general ...
no subject
Once they deciphered Mayan and found out the content of all those steles was pretty much the same as you'd find on an obelisk of Rameses II or stele of Sargon III, ("I, King of A, smote the godless heathens and put up this stele to commemorate how awesome I am") that nonsense stopped.
The teaching of history, rhetoric and logic is horribly neglected in the present public education system, at least in my country. Logic and rhetoric, frankly, need to be taught again, because the Internet is full of bad debaters, and people who are too easily swayed by cheap tricks and bad arguments.