Totally not worth it to argue with reviews, except privately with friends, of course. haha. I hate the sort of reviews you describe as well. I also hate the reviews where someone "can't relate" or "identify with" or "like" a character. I just don't understand the point of reading about only characters you can relate to. I guess I'm more interested in ones that have different experiences than my own. Maybe that's not the dominant way people read, though, because you always hear people using this kind of language, so maybe a lot more people read to find themselves in the book rather than to find other sorts of people. For me, though, growing up, I found mostly characters who had lives very unlike my own (unless it was reading backwards in time, to like, agrarian and small town fiction, but then that didn't feel right either, because there was a lot of different stuff in those narratives because of historical changes in even agrarian, small town life). So maybe this is why I'm wired to read for the experience of others than to locate characters that are similar to me in some way.
We've been told we're from nowhere when it's not true. That's a very midwestern thing, I find. There were a lot of small towns like your mom's. Some people would argue that the changes that have occurred were inevitable, but I think they mainly changed to make a small group of people wealthier mostly, and not much care has been taken about preserving communities as they changed the rules of the game. Youngstown once had 180,000 people. It now has 85,000. I guess I'm not cool with the whole go where work is thing, either. It just feels wrong, despite it being the thing people have done throughout history when work migrates to other places. I'd rather go down with the ship and flip the world the finger than stay in it and play that sort of game. Unwise, but it's how I feel.
I know what you mean about wanting to write about other countries and space and places that don't exist, too, and wanting to write about the Midwest as well. I think you can do both. I'm trying to do that, too. Hopefully we've got a lot of years of ahead of us to do what we want! (Oh look, the optimist in me came out.) :)
no subject
We've been told we're from nowhere when it's not true. That's a very midwestern thing, I find. There were a lot of small towns like your mom's. Some people would argue that the changes that have occurred were inevitable, but I think they mainly changed to make a small group of people wealthier mostly, and not much care has been taken about preserving communities as they changed the rules of the game. Youngstown once had 180,000 people. It now has 85,000. I guess I'm not cool with the whole go where work is thing, either. It just feels wrong, despite it being the thing people have done throughout history when work migrates to other places. I'd rather go down with the ship and flip the world the finger than stay in it and play that sort of game. Unwise, but it's how I feel.
I know what you mean about wanting to write about other countries and space and places that don't exist, too, and wanting to write about the Midwest as well. I think you can do both. I'm trying to do that, too. Hopefully we've got a lot of years of ahead of us to do what we want! (Oh look, the optimist in me came out.) :)