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I find this sad and alarming, Celia. I too had a book to review recently - another fantasy in fact - which I turned down because I couldn't have said a positive thing about it. It wasn't only the poor writing and the cliches, it was the way in which 'good' characters could be as violent and unpleasant as they liked, so long as they were doing it to the 'bad' ones. It was an ignorant, nasty piece of work which could only help to give fantasy a bad name.

It's frightening that such rubbish is being published and marketed to children and young adults. Junk food - with all sorts of nasty e-numbers - for the brain.

I've read a lot of blogs about this and, I have to say, I have nothing to say against Frey for the Million Little Pieces debacle. But this is the first post that has so starkly analysed the relation of what Frey is doing to the art world (to show how dim I've been before I read this I hadn't equated Fiction *Factory* with an attempt to be Andy). It's a brief but excellent comparison. I love Koons. And Thomas Heatherwick, and a whole host of other artists who have large production teams working for them. And I run a literary gallery that hosts exhibitions that present fiction in a manner normally saved for art (we even have our live shows at a local gallery in Oxford) so I love exploring the myriad overlaps between literature and art. And, er, this isn't one of them! Artists (I remember as a teenager seeing a really scathing article on pop art guru Mark Kostabi and his slogan "they work in cages for minimum wages") DO get rounded on for exploitation. Sometimes rightly so. But in most cases, there is a production team because the artwork is big, and the whole thing works like architecture (you'd hardly chastise Norman Foster for getting the builders in). And besides, art workshops are as old as art itself, especially for large scale art.

This, to repeat, isn't like that. For exactly the reason you say. This isn't a creative auteur hiring technicians to realise their vision (the relation it bears to Warhol's Factory on the other hand, I'll leave for biographers to pick over - and they will, the parallels are rife). It's more like a celeb endorsement, like a jar of Lloyd Grossman sauce. And like such things, I guess it'll stand or fall by the pull of Frey's name. Hmmm...

I find this very sad, not only for the reasons mentioned but because you feel somehow that a real book has been not-published, or at least, not published as well and carefully as it should be because of such stuff being so ubiquitous. Most disheartening, really. Thanks for drawing it to our attention, Celia.

Two words for you - "Working" + "Partners"!

Yes, Mary - I was thinking the same thing. Isn't this just book packaging, as has been done for yonks by WP and others? The mystery is, how is it getting lauded as 'book of the year', etc. The innovation seems to be in the marketing rather than the production.

This irritates me greatly. It leaves less room for my carefully arranged cat hairs to ever see the shelves of a bookshop!

I hate to say this, but do wonder if the "Books For Boys" movement - while being a laudable idea in itself - isn't promoting a certain style of writing as being "what children want."

Or what people think readers want? Not always the same thing. Sometimes, these cynical moves founder. Let us hope so, anyway.

Thanks for the posts. Interesting discussion and something that needs airing - nobody likes to feel that they are being exploited or taken for a fool.