Jabberwocky Reviews

1: You Must Remember This by FranklinBarnes

Blurb:

"This roaring homage to Catch-22 transplants dysfunctional bureaucracy to a Silicon Valley high school (aptly named Heller High School) plagued by incompetent students and even more incompetent teachers. One exploiter of the system is Franklin Barnes, who after growing tired of his peers' seeming disinterest in anything but the triviality of high school, writes a satirical manifesto lampooning all they stand for in the name of "becoming a good person." Ironically, his absurd maxims are lapped up by his peers, who see Frank's teachings as a fast track to success.After an admired teacher suggests Frank look into the Third Wave, Frank makes the misguided decision of seeing exactly how far he can take his new social experiment, his initial desire to help Heller see the light outweighed by his morbid curiosity. As Frank works on consolidating his own power, he deals with managing the angsty crises of his peers who through some miracle see Frank as a mentor, and the growing romantic attention of one of his devotees.

CW: minor character death (non-graphic), dark psychological themes (e.g. gaslighting), authoritarian regimes (including references to communism and Nazism)

"Amazing, terrible, bourgeois horror"

"At first I thought the story was about silicone implants"

"I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves the classic American English course reading list or just wants to read something that will make them think."

"

So first off, you've given me a tough nut to crack, and I think you know it. I don't know quite what I expected to read on Wattpad, especially for my first review, but I'm sure glad I picked this book to review first, since otherwise there's no way I'd be able to get through all of it and give you what you signed up for. Because of your book's length, this is also going to be a relatively long review, but you get what you signed up for. To anyone reading this, I wouldn't expect your own reviews to be this long unless you've submitted a similarly lengthy book. I got this review out very quickly because I'm still on spring break, but expect future reviews to come out more slowly.

I know I said I wouldn't comment on graphics, but I think your cover looks nice. It's very colorful, and it almost reminds me of one of those Chinese watercolor paintings. You could maybe clean up some of the lines a bit, but that's just stylistic preference.

Going into your title and blurb, we get a lot of information that makes it very clear that you're writing literary fiction, and a very specific sort too. Casablanca comes up a lot in your novel, and your title is a quote from it; you also mention Catch-22 in your blurb. The issue here is that these are two cultural references a lot of people on Wattpad won't recognize. It makes your book feel uninviting to them when it seems like there's a joke they aren't in on. And I'll talk about this again in a moment. That aside, I think your blurb is strong: it's dense, like the rest of your novel, but I can clearly understand what the novel is about and I think it's a good summary of what actually happens. It's clear that you're writing this aimed at a very technical, well-read audience.

I quite enjoyed the first few chapters, even if they were heavier in description than might be typical for Wattpad. At first I thought the descriptions were meandering solely for the sake of paying homage to the older novels you reference (The Scarlet Letter, for instance), but they create a very strong atmosphere for Heller with a lot of specific details and characterization, characterization that plays into the rest of the novel. I saw foreshadowing to later parts of the novel and specific thematic callbacks in future chapters that told me this was well thought-out.

Now, as I can tell you've seen in your comments on these first few chapters (your comments grow a bit more sparse later, mainly because readers grew bored), there are a lot of these specific details that did not mesh with your readers. I don't want to quote other people without their permission, but you might recall one long discussion about the appropriateness of mentioning Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance. While I consider myself a cultured individual and know who he is, clearly many of your readers didn't. And even later on, some people expressed awe—or perhaps resignation—at how much they thought was going over their heads. And this puts you at a crossroads: as a MFA student with a lot of experience with writing craft, I don't mind these sorts of details, the Shakespeare quotes you sneaked in or the extended allegory to The Producers. But I'm not the person you're writing for on Wattpad, and you need to decide who you want to please. If you're the sort of guy who wants to keep having arguments about Frank Lloyd Wright in your comments, you don't have to change any of this, but if you want the success on Wattpad I think you believe you deserve, you're going to have to make some adjustments.