annotation: Bear Season
Jan. 30th, 2025 08:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matsushima posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
pineislandOh, Bear Season. I wanted so badly to love this book and I did not.
I already wrote a bit about my disappointment that Jade's thesis was not, in fact, in the form of a thesis or a diary or stream-of-consciousness but was 99% normal prose? Like, come on.
When I started getting really into found fiction, the phrase that came to me was "fidelity to form." It was (is) important to me that I mimic the chosen format as closely as possible. In my case, that's often at the expense of, uh, characters or plot - which is something I need to work on! It's a complicated balancing act but I was really bummed out that Gemma Fairclough didn't even try to write a pretend thesis or even a real investigative journalism piece. (It's hard! I've started fiddling around with a pretend undergrad research paper and even that is a lot of work!)
The whole book felt underbaked. The unsolved mystery at the end was very obvious and the stuff about how Carla knew Jake in the '90s and he was secretly gay felt very rushed. There was a throwaway paragraph about otherkin believing that Jade really did turn into a bear but that felt like the author just wanted us to know, hey, she's aware that therianthropes exist; it didn't serve the story at all and there was nothing interesting or insightful that Gemma Fairclough couldn't've learned about either community from a quick search, so why even bother? (I'm not otherkin but there's a non-zero overlap between otherkin and soulbonders so I'm familiar with the community.)
This book was such a bummer.
I already wrote a bit about my disappointment that Jade's thesis was not, in fact, in the form of a thesis or a diary or stream-of-consciousness but was 99% normal prose? Like, come on.
When I started getting really into found fiction, the phrase that came to me was "fidelity to form." It was (is) important to me that I mimic the chosen format as closely as possible. In my case, that's often at the expense of, uh, characters or plot - which is something I need to work on! It's a complicated balancing act but I was really bummed out that Gemma Fairclough didn't even try to write a pretend thesis or even a real investigative journalism piece. (It's hard! I've started fiddling around with a pretend undergrad research paper and even that is a lot of work!)
The whole book felt underbaked. The unsolved mystery at the end was very obvious and the stuff about how Carla knew Jake in the '90s and he was secretly gay felt very rushed. There was a throwaway paragraph about otherkin believing that Jade really did turn into a bear but that felt like the author just wanted us to know, hey, she's aware that therianthropes exist; it didn't serve the story at all and there was nothing interesting or insightful that Gemma Fairclough couldn't've learned about either community from a quick search, so why even bother? (I'm not otherkin but there's a non-zero overlap between otherkin and soulbonders so I'm familiar with the community.)
This book was such a bummer.
