I must say I've just had a good laugh. I was perusing the message board for my high school class on classmates.com. Now, classmates has been a source of many sales of the Kritzer books, and the reaction to them from those folks has been amazing. Until the last two - two people I recently saw at that reunion. They both didn't like the books at all - one, a guy, because it wasn't reflective of the way HE grew up and the neighborhood from HIS point of view, and the other, a gal, because she thought there wasn't any believable character development, and that the relationship between Benjamin and his mother, while amusing at first, grew tiresome and unrealistic. She, too, wished it had been more reflective of how SHE had grown up. Isn't that funny? What did they think - I was going to write a book and be GENERAL? Did they think I'd write a book about my growing up and that I should make it so it should include things about everyone else's childhood, too, just so they can feel part of it?
And they both said the same thing at the end: Nice try. Thankfully, negative comments about the Kritzer books are almost non-existent - in fact, these are the first I've ever seen, and these posts were written within days of each other. While I would never have a problem with people not liking a book, the reasons in these posts seem rather silly to me. BUT, as I always say - that's what makes horse racing.
