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Title: Jay's Journal
Author: Beatrice Sparks
Published: Simon Pulse, 2010 (1979)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 230
Total Page Count: 527,165
Text Number: 1929
Read Because: read Unmask Alice and got curious, paperback borrowed from the Deschutes Public Library c/o Timberland Regional library via interlibrary loan (haven't done an ILL in over a decade & wow it feels fancy to point at a far-away library book and have it delivered onto you, although reading real paper isn't something I can do often so I'll have to restrain my newfound powers)
Review: A troubled teen boy is seduced by the occult. This is impossible to separate from its genesis, especially as I picked it up immediately after reading Emerson's Unmask Alice. So: shaking my head to show I disapprove of Sparks/the harm done by Jay's Journal, while also saying:
Boy, what a ride. Is it good? Absolutely not. It feels more unhinged than Go Ask Alice, like Sparks had to do more inventing than exaggerating and it shows; the core of authenticity is lost. But when pushed to vomit up an imagining of what the occult (Satanic Panic version) looks like in practice, Sparks is insightfully incoherent. There's a lot of the quaint: we levitated objects again, it was cool I guess; we had occult-fueled Deep Insights into the Universe, none of which I'll record here. And then there's the picturesque, the ridiculous and, like most id writing, the weirdly compelling: seduced by a counselor at my residential treatment center, possessed by a demon named Raul who wants me for my hot bod; bloody orgies and cattle mutilation given long, loving descriptions to break up one-paragraph entries about debate tournaments. The pacing is horrible, the writing worse, Debbie/Tina are interchangeable, but in many ways this is just what I was hoping for. The YA problem novel succeeds because it's titillating; because I'm being told, no, don't, while watching with undisguised fascination the evolving grotesque. And the shape of that grotesque exposes the things that compel and scare us, that are 'problems,' like queer desire and sex and the furor of adolescence. Sparks deserves none of that as praise. This is bad, full stop, and its context unforgivable. But! It was worth the interlibrary loan.
Author: Beatrice Sparks
Published: Simon Pulse, 2010 (1979)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 230
Total Page Count: 527,165
Text Number: 1929
Read Because: read Unmask Alice and got curious, paperback borrowed from the Deschutes Public Library c/o Timberland Regional library via interlibrary loan (haven't done an ILL in over a decade & wow it feels fancy to point at a far-away library book and have it delivered onto you, although reading real paper isn't something I can do often so I'll have to restrain my newfound powers)
Review: A troubled teen boy is seduced by the occult. This is impossible to separate from its genesis, especially as I picked it up immediately after reading Emerson's Unmask Alice. So: shaking my head to show I disapprove of Sparks/the harm done by Jay's Journal, while also saying:
Boy, what a ride. Is it good? Absolutely not. It feels more unhinged than Go Ask Alice, like Sparks had to do more inventing than exaggerating and it shows; the core of authenticity is lost. But when pushed to vomit up an imagining of what the occult (Satanic Panic version) looks like in practice, Sparks is insightfully incoherent. There's a lot of the quaint: we levitated objects again, it was cool I guess; we had occult-fueled Deep Insights into the Universe, none of which I'll record here. And then there's the picturesque, the ridiculous and, like most id writing, the weirdly compelling: seduced by a counselor at my residential treatment center, possessed by a demon named Raul who wants me for my hot bod; bloody orgies and cattle mutilation given long, loving descriptions to break up one-paragraph entries about debate tournaments. The pacing is horrible, the writing worse, Debbie/Tina are interchangeable, but in many ways this is just what I was hoping for. The YA problem novel succeeds because it's titillating; because I'm being told, no, don't, while watching with undisguised fascination the evolving grotesque. And the shape of that grotesque exposes the things that compel and scare us, that are 'problems,' like queer desire and sex and the furor of adolescence. Sparks deserves none of that as praise. This is bad, full stop, and its context unforgivable. But! It was worth the interlibrary loan.
