The real test here is: are you fully inhabiting the existing reality? Can you describe David Barclay Moore’s appearance and sexual preference without googling him?
For extra credit: is the book about racism and homophobia?
If you can’t answer these questions on the spot, you are not ready for life in year 2025.
Clarissa's Blog 
In 25 words, I can tell I would hate this book.
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It’s really funny how everybody immediately knows without looking it up that the author is black and gay. Who needs textual analysis when you have identity politics?
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“I did feel scared, but also excited.”
Only way that was published and selected for the SAT: checked the right tickboxes. Did it also make the NYT bestseller list?
-ethyl
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I haven’t checked but it’s very likely. I’m sure it’s assigned reading in many schools. And then we keep complaining that kids don’t read.
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We give them the most stultifyingly boring material.
I am reading Marryat’s *Mr. Midshipman Easy* to my kids. The vocabulary is complex, the wording is sly and full of puns, and the syntax is 19th century. And they love it. It is hilarious and “just one more chapter! Please!”
Why don’t we assign this in schools? Because it’s too hard? Why don’t we read aloud past the kiddie grades? That’s how you build comprehension and vocabulary, to pave the way for their reading complex literature on their own!
My father reports that his teacher in second grade read Moby Dick to the class, aloud. A passage per day. The whole class was enraptured.
But no, that’s all “too hard” so we give them the most boring, awful, badly written drivel available.
sigh.
-ethyl
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Published in 2022, not a legacy author like Franzen. We know he’s not straight and white.
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Yep. Works every single time.
I play this game at bookstores sometimes. If a book has a male name on the cover, the author is either not white or over 60. I am yet to be mistaken, unfortunately.
But tons of novels by 20-something women with identical writing and identical plots.
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“I did feel scared, but also excited.”
What gets me is the question uses the exact same words… this is not too far from Idiocracy…
Why can’t it be ‘frightened and stimulated’ or ‘he felt anxiety and anticipation’?
No… the exact same words.
Tests reveal differences so they have to be hollowed out.
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