Lollerskates! A blog about narrative faults in Twilight.
I finished The Child Thief, and marveled at the lack of research into American history, city life, and military and poverty culture. Basically, this retelling of Peter Pan features Peter as a child thief, luring children into Avalon/Faerie to fight in its defense. The plot-holes include Sekeu’s appearance (she’s a Native girlwho looks Southwestern indigenous, wears a black feathered headdress, speaks English, and is somehow in the NYC area around 1886, well after the Trail of Tears and the end of slavery. Her backstory isn’t provided, but these collective elements don’t make sense); why Nick’s mother is not entitled to death benefits after her military husband’s death; why the drug dealers that move into Nick’s house are small time drug dealers, yet have in hand nearly 7 pounds of meth; why it didn’t occur to any of the other denizens of Avalon that the Horned God got around a fair amount, and has more heirs; and why Abraham, who’s an escaped slave, speaks modern AAVE. The other thing that REALLY bugged me is that if Peter Pan is truly going after “lost” youth, then demographically there should be more girls than boys, more LGBT youth than heterosexual, and more mentally unwell youth than neurotypical. This is not going into the fact that any group of Lost Children collected by someone specifically looking for runaways/at-risk youth is going to include a fair number of mixed race/brown-skinned kids. All around race/research/gender/sexuality/history fail.
Here’s my take away from this as a writer: use Google. I know Sekeu is supposed to be Tiger Lily, but seriously, I thought dark, gritty retellings were supposed to draw their vivacity from, y’know, their realism. Realism requires at least some cursory research.