Stirring the Fires of Imagination

I love Young Adult fiction! I don't know why, but some of these books just come up with the craziest concepts, or put a totally new spin on them. I just finished reading Cinder by Melissa Meyer and I am still buzzing with adrenaline. I love it. I'll post a formal review of it later but I think I finished in, like, a day? After work tomorrow I am planning on stopping by Walmart and oh so casually being like, "Oh, yeah, Dad, I need to run into Stuff-Mart real quick and pick up something... No just something. Do we need lemons while we're here?" I will probably have to pick up the next two books if they all end the same way Cinder did... not that that's a bad thing. ;-)
My brain feels on fire now. If I didn't have to get up early I would totally right into the wee hours of the night. How far away is the weekend? Curses. I guess I will just have to go without TV for a while. Hahaha.
But, seriously.
Going back to my opening statement, I do love Young Adult fiction, although some of it I'll relent can get tedious and predictable. But then there are those times when you pick up a book, read the book jacket, glance at a few pages... and abracadabra, you've got yourself a new summer obsession. I think I gravitate toward the YA genre because it offers a really colorful perspective for me. Hmm... let me see if I can word that better. When you pick up a book that you know has been written for adults, your brain enters into this mindset. You become really serious and any humor is dry, forced, or inappropriate. But with YA, I feel like there're no limits, no constraints. I've found myself trying to incorporate more and more of the real world and just logistics and things like that into my fantasy stories, and I truly believe they have suffered for it. Then I look at something like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid and... have you ever read the original Little Mermaid? Yeah, it's ending is not Disney-approved, but the way he writes about the under-sea kingdom is magnetic. That's the word I would use. Magnetic. And mesmerizing. And beautiful. I love that YA novels have the capacity to be beautiful, funny, imaginative, captivating and new. Although certain criteria are usually met, I find the stories themselves wonderfully engrossing. And when they are spins on classis, like Cinder, it piques my interest even more. Yeah, I'm a sucker for the classics, and even more so for Disney, and this book just hit all the right markers.

-Grace