An interesting bit of insight or turn of character could have turned Skim around in a heartbeat-or at least nudged it in the right direction. Stories don’t have to be all about churning out one exciting event after another. If a Cheryl-the-data-analyst story chronicling the humdrum of the day-in-and-out had a point or explored Cheryl in an interesting fashion or gave us a better view of ourselves, then maybe a story about Cheryl would merit the pages devoted to her.
The problem is when these stories either don’t take their characters to new places or, in choosing to maroon their characters in personal stagnation, have nothing to add to the human conversation. Great literature is lousy with the stuff. Now don’t read me as saying there’s no place for teenagers or average people or mundane stories in fiction. It’s more just that their stories aren’t different enough from our own to merit our interest. It’s not that such people can’t be fascinating on an individual level or don’t lead wholly worthwhile lives.
#Skim around reviews driver#
There’s a reason that people don’t read biographies of the average person, that they don’t salivate to discover what occurs next in the life of Joe the bus driver or Cheryl the data analyst or Tom the elementary school custodian. Skim might as well be biography for how mundane it all is-biography of a perfectly average life with nothing to recommend it. In the end, her troubles are typical and her response to them expected. (No offense to Wiccans or teenagers who aren’t these things.) She is, after all, a teenager deeply in love with herself and the prison she can turn life into. She’s exactly as miserable as you would expect her to be. She’s also a bit of a dilettante, dabbling in the arts and in an amateurish brand of Wicca (she has an altar in her bedroom, goes to the woods to summon a recently deceased student, and wears charms meant to bring her love). She’s kind of a more reserved, less acerbic, less funny version of Ghost World‘s Enid. She describes herself-in that perfectly elitist manner that seems unique to those who haven’t really seen much of the world-as a freak, as someone whom those around her could never possibly understand even if given the time an infinite number of monkeys are usually allotted to complete literary masterworks. She bears the typical marks of teen self-righteousness, believing herself wise and aloof, better than those around her. Kim, as protagonist, is not someone who captures reader interest. Harry was not someone whom I really wanted to spend that entire book with.Īnd it’s pretty much the same thing with Skim. Whiny, moody, reckless, selfish, and irritable.
But really, do we need more Harry Potter: Book Fives? Because in case you forgot, Harry was a repellent little punk in that book. I mean, it’s fine to have the occasional literary novel posit a realistic kid just so readers unfamiliar with our younger world-companions will remember that teenagers are really just like adults minus the perspective, wisdom, and restraint that experience grants those who live to be older than teenagers.
It’s good then that most authors diminish the realism of their teenage protagonists for the sake of their story, substituting instead younger versions of their adult selves. Their social perception is little better than that of gradeschoolers-and what growth exists is generally diminished by an acute absence of wisdom. Their insights are comically common, with the depth of a drying brook. Their problems are generally overblown trivialities. There is one singular obstacle facing any author who hopes to present a story featuring realistically portrayed teenagers: teens are uninteresting. I’m sure that if I were of like age, culture, and circumstance with Skim‘s lead, Kimberly Keiko Cameron, I might find the book soul-piercing and intelligent. Being neither a teenage girl nor overly sympathetic toward the needlessly mopey, I am pretty clearly not the target audience for Skim.
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