Does every heroine have to have red hair and every love interest “amazingly dark green eyes”? (EVERNIGHT sparked this complaint, but believe you me, it ain’t just that book.)
The first line in this book's blurb?
'The only beautiful thing in Ivy's drab life is her glorious red hair.'
How many of these cliches have you noticed, and how many bother you? A huge number struck a chord with me — either as things I’ve been annoyed by myself (”Using coffee, cappuccino, and café latte to describe black people’s skin”) or things that hadn’t really occurred to me, but upon reading, seemed Duh!-worthy (”Using the word ‘rents for parents, but not using any other slang”).
But her ironic choice for #1 (”Lists”) doesn’t do it for me, mostly because I don’t care how often this is done, I love it always and forever — whether it’s Anastasia Krupnik or Bud E. Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself.
Emily already mentioned how THE PRINCESS BRIDE is one of the few kids’ books to have been made into a genuinely good movie, but one thing the book does do better comes from its lists: in the movie, when it ends with history’s greatest kiss blah blah blah, it’s a little bit irredeemably cheesy; but in the book, where the narrator’s been obsessively ranking everything about Buttercup all along, it fits perfectly.
Posted in Anastasia Krupnik series, Bud, Not Buddy, Curtis, Christopher Paul, Friday "Why?"/Random Book Questions, Goldman, William S., Lowry, Lois, On Genre, Princess Bride, The
“Startlingly green eyes.”
I just realized that’s the usual cliche for love interests. I would bet that if I searched through my full YA bookshelf I’d find a dozen instances.
I thought there was a law or something that girls with red hair had to wear green clothes most of the time. And if clothes, why not eyes? “Startlingly green eyes” has feline connotations, at least in my mind.
Lists can be an endearing device — think of “High Fidelity,” (not a kids’ book, I know) which begins with the narrator’s top five memorable break-ups. But Facebook is making it get old fast.
And how could Emily have left “Wizard of Oz” off her list of good movies from kids’ books? As for Princess Bride, I don’t know but I suspect that Goldman was thinking movie when he wrote the novel, even though the film wasn’t made till more than a decade later. Goldman started out to be a novelist, but his stuff was second rate at best and never went anywhere. But he tried screen writing and turned out to be very good at it. So my guess is that at some point, he started thinking of novels in cinematic terms.
Hi. Someone let me know that you’d posted about this on your site, so I dropped by. Love your post! The MG/YA writer, Alan Gratz has been complaining about green eyes for forever too. I met him years ago, before my article, and he complained about it then. I’m not sure why it never ended up on the list, because I totally agree. I just did an article about cliche characters for SCBWI’s bulletin (last month, I think), which I’ll be posting soon on my site. Maybe my next piece will have to be about green eyes! Haha. Oh, wait. You just covered it.
As for lists, I love them too! They just show up a lot, so they kind of had to go on the list. I wasn’t really intending to tell people not to use ANY of those things, just pointing out that if you think they’re original ideas then you’re probably not reading enough!
Loved your post. I’ll stop by again.
Thanks, Joelle! Yeah, I have nothing against redheaded protagonists and green-eyed boyfriends, but you do notice it when it comes up over, and over, and over. (Well, I guess I don’t have to tell you that!)
I think you got the crux of it with “Guys with extraordinarily long eyelashes,” and me when I thought of how often it’s “startlingly green eyes.” Of course a lot of love interest characters will have long eyelashes; it’s an attractive trait. But when you see these same phrases over and over, it feels less like the author has imagined a specific person in their head that they’re trying to help you see too, and more like they’re pressing the buttons that are supposed to produce an effect of “Attractive!”
“Let’s see now, we’ve got the startlingly green eyes, which she notices but is too shy to say anything about, so she hides behind her red hair, smattering of freckles, and tendency to blush…”
It’s the problem with any cliche: it’s trying to produce an impression by bypassing the stage that involves actually imagining something. So, it’s weak writing.
Thanks for your list; it’s really great.
Jay: Good point about Goldman writing the book as setup for a movie. That seems highly plausible. It’s stylized in all the right ways to become a film. (Although, the device he uses where he pretends he’s drawing from a bizarre academic tome — the one I embarassingly fell for — would never have worked in movie form.)
THE PRINCESS BRIDE and THE WIZARD OF OZ both come from books that are clearly for children, but are movies that are not so clearly so. Is that just because they’re so campy… or is it not so much intrinsic to the movies, as that the campiness fits in perfectly with the strong tendency of my generation (and those about 10 years older than me) toward nostalgia?
Jay: Such a good call on THE WIZARD OF OZ - I don’t know how I forgot it.
Elizabeth: I actually disagree, I think of THE WIZARD OF OZ movie as squarely for kids, which is not to say adults don’t also love it, partly because of nostalgia, and partly because its just a damn good movie, but I do think of it as primarly a kids movie. Whereas I do think of THE PRINCESS BRIDE as being a bit more of an all-ages movie.
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it more I might concede this point. Maybe the difference is that the humor in THE PRINCESS BRIDE swings a bit more to the ironic side (I’m thinking, for example, of the ROUSes). THE WIZARD OF OZ is many things, but it is not subtle.
I have hazel eyes, green flecked with brown, but they appear golden brown unless you really look closely. I’ve always been fascinated by green eyes and startling green eyes are quite rare. It sets up how special the character is, and aren’t there a lot of special characters in literature? Violet eyes are pretty common in romance novels I hear.
Did you get my e-mail by the way? Emily can answer too of course!!
Ooh, I just did now! (Emily usually checks the Underage Reading account.) Thanks so much!