Here’s how blurbs work, in general. An author writes a book. If the author is very lucky, a publisher gives them a deal for that book. The publisher’s marketing team then draws up a plan for how best to get readers, bookshops, and book reviewers interested in the book. That plan will include getting other authors to say that they think the book is good: a blurb. The author, the editors, and the marketing team will send versions of the book, in digital and physical “proof” formats, out to authors with some name recognition that they think might read the book ahead of its publication and offer their positive feedback, so that when the book is released into the world at large, it will do so with those quotes on its cover.
Sounds good, on the face of it. Books go out to readers adorned with reassuring evidence that the book is worth that reader’s time. But almost everybody in the literary world hates them. And depending on what corner of that world people occupy—reviewer, author, bookshop buyer, bookseller, book critic, agent, book editor, marketing professional—they hate them for slightly different, often conflicting reasons. On the heels of the Simon & Schuster news, I asked people from across this ecosystem to anonymously dish the dirt: What’s so bad about blurbs?
Junior year of high school, my mom took me to the dentist to have my teeth filed down into sharp, flat daggers, then covered with perfect, shinier teeth, like press-on nails. They were called veneers. All the Hollywood It Girls like Hilary Duff were getting them at the time, whereas my broke-ass classmates could barely afford fake vampire teeth for their Halloween costumes.
Technically, Mom couldn’t afford to buy me veneers either. Once as a kid, I asked her if she could take me to the library, and she told me we couldn’t go because gas was too expensive. It wasn’t the first time I realized we were poor, but it was the first time our poverty seemed cartoonishly inescapable: we couldn’t even afford to drive five blocks for free shit.
In addition to being a clever use of format in which to seed clues and unravel the truth, this is a terrific examination of old shibboleths that still have uncomfortable relevance for readers today. The Turnglass as a whole confronts readers with the many ways in which injustice – whether it be via patriarchy, classism, or eugenics – has manifested throughout history, cloaking itself in a pretense of caring for the disadvantaged while ruthlessly enriching itself via their exploitation.
Brendan’s magic isn’t the kind that comes from a wand, but the kind that arises out of love. This is a surprising, tender and warm-hearted novel about a real place and real people: a gentle gift for spring.
Starling House demonstrates that Alix E. Harrow is an author to follow for anyone who finds pleasure in surprising reconfigurations of familiar genre conventions into something entirely new and alluring.