Tag Archives: book wtf

Sometimes you should just ignore cheap books on the discount rack. A $4 copy of “Fairy Tales for Girls” seemed like a good idea at the time. Instead, it turned out to be a book of overly long, poorly edited fairy tales chock full of grammatical errors. In addition to those joys, the illustrations are inconsistent at best. Check out what happens with the pictures of Beast in “Beauty and the Beast”.

The first time we see Beast, his head is almost as big as his body. He truly does look like a beast. How can you even hold up a head that big?

By the time Beauty meets Beast, he is several feet shorter and has a normal-sized head. Was his head inflated with rage in the first picture? Did Beauty’s presence change his physical appearance? I assume this is a professional illustrator. How can there be so much difference between the first and second pictures!

Beast changes in size AGAIN when he’s dying waiting for Beauty to return from her father’s estate. I know he’s under a witch’s spell that makes him look like a monster, but I don’t recall the spell having anything to do with constant shape-shifting. WTF, illustrator?

And then, when Beast becomes human, he apparently turns into a woman.

That’s not how I remember it, but that’s what the illustration looks like!

I’m all for same-sex couples, but I have a feeling that’s not what the author or illustrator intended to portray.

WTF, book illustrator? I can see you are skilled enough to make nice looking paintings, but learn how to be consistent and also how to make a man look like a man. Long hair alone isn’t what’s making the prince look like a princess. The prince has a very feminine looking bone structure and face.

I could understand maybe a little variation in the size of the beast, but he’s seriously half his original size in the second picture.

How do you mess up that badly? How could the editors see those pictures and think “Perfect! Let’s go to print!”

I just don’t get it. WTF?

If you were a teenage girl in the 1990s, you probably loved Christopher Pike like I did. If you didn’t, we can no longer be friends. A recent trip to Books-A-Million brought me face to face with the Christopher Pike novel Sati. At first I was excited that there might be a new book, but when I read the back I recognized the story about a girl who claims she is God.

Then I opened the book and found this disclaimer:

Sati was published in the 1980s, and the story reflects that time. Thus there are no cell phones, Internet, or special drug cocktails to combat AIDS. The author had the option of editing this book, but felt it best to leave the tale of Sati’s visit as it was originally written.

My mind was boggled.

This passage implies that young adult readers expect every book to include present day technology. The tone of the disclaimer seems to indicate that the publisher thinks Christopher Pike did the wrong thing by not editing this book.

Since when do previously-published books get edited to include cell phones? I have trouble understanding why the context of the book would not give away the era or the fact that these things didn’t exist. Are today’s teenagers really so stupid that they’d be reading this book questioning the characters for not getting on the internet?

Are they going to start putting disclaimers like this on all books? Are kids opening Little House on the Prairie and wondering why the hell Laura Ingalls is riding in a covered wagon instead of a car?

The very existence of this disclaimer depresses me about what it means the publisher’s think about today’s youth. I’d like to think teenagers these days are smart enough to figure out the book they are reading was written in the past. But maybe I’m too optimistic?

Seriously, WTF?

This “Sing Along Song” book is in constant use at our house.

But my daughter is really troubled by one of its illustrations.

The illustration for the song “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain” is of a girl riding ONE white horse. As the song says, “She’ll be driving SIX white horses when she comes”. Why on earth is there only one horse in this illustration?

I know it’s just representational, but Lily is really bothered by it. She talks about it endlessly. I have on video part of a 20 minute conversation she had on the phone with my mother about how the book has the wrong word. She starts going on about it at about the 34 second mark here, though talked about it much more before I got out the camera.

“No, not six. One! There’s only ONE white horse, right Nonni? We need a new book. This book has the wrong word!” according to Lily.

I showed her a new book in the store and how there’s still only one white horse in it… or that the word is “six” instead of “one” (she can read), but she still thinks there’s a new book out there somewhere that says “She’ll be driving one white horse when she comes”.

Really, the lyrics to this song are extremely well known. It’s ridiculous that they only drew one horse… and had the girl riding the horse instead of driving them from a buggy or wagon or something. WTF, publisher/illustrator?