Never Have Touched With a Red-Hot Stick

Pratchett showed up the ridiculous nature of the literary

establishment by writing a bad and boring book weaving

tedious debates about atheism and colonialism aimed at

brainwashing the youth, into a story without dialogue &

character development - and amazingly enough -

 

Simply because he incorporated literary and sociological

fashionable themes into this book, it was “an Honor Book

in the 2009 Michael L Printz Award for Excellence in Young

Adult Literature” and won the “Brit Writer's Award Published

Writer of the year 2010” yet it is the kind of book -

 

Terry Pratchett, the avid young reader himself, would never

have touched with a white hot stick - he never admitted to

any deceit after publishing it, but it sure is the best satire on

literary convention of all time, I can just see Douglas Adams

laughing with glee seeing what academia tried to do with it:

 

Trying to force it on bright young kids who quickly unmasked

this attempt at propaganda - Terry enjoyed the joke without

ever saying anything and stoically accepting the Doctorates

knowing that the establishment is dishonest, self-justifying

& the book’s arguments will convince no-one of anything…

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 Some reviews of “Nation” on Goodreads:

 “We had to read this book for school and it was awful. This book was extremely confusing, obviously was not proofread, had an embarrassingly large amount of typos and was tortuously BORING.

 Confusing: Throughout the book I was never sure of what was happening. When they made the huge discovery near the end of the book, it didn’t even register with me. The confusion made the book...

Boring: This is one of the top ten most boring books I have ever read. I would stare at a page for ten minutes and not understand what was going on. I have found that a book needs ACTION and DIALOGUE  to make it interesting. In this book, surprise, surprise, there was essentially NO ACTION except for two parts of about five pages each. And until about 1/3 of the way through the book, there was no dialogue. I was bored for a large percentage of the book. My peers all agreed with me that it was INCREDIBLY BORING. I cannot stress enough how tedious this book was.

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“Ugh I had to read this for class... Not good. Our class read it, hated it so much, so the teacher pulled it off the curriculum for the upcoming years. Wow.

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 “Sadly, this story seemed to go nowhere. There was little to no character development. The same plot lines carried on for far too long with seemingly no end in sight.

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 “I wanted to love this book, but I just couldn't connect with the characters. There's a saucy parrot with an extensive vocabulary of swear words thrown in for comic relief, but it's not enough. The ending is far too pragmatic to be satisfying.

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 “Boring as hell. Most chapters feel/seem all filler. I don't enjoy any of the characters. I dislike the writing style even more than I despise the "island saved by white girl" trope.

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 “I should have known I wouldn't like it when the author misused 'literally' on the FIRST PAGE. "The cargo was flying out of the ship, literally; the cranes strained in their efforts to get the bales out as quickly as possible"?! The book had potential, but I never felt respected as a reader. Or rather, I usually don't think about it - but this book made me realize I need to be respected. For example, I was constantly reminded of why the British (shipwrecked) weren't culturally superior to the natives on the island ...and I never thought they were."

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