My Most (Realistic) Year

So I met with The Mix last weekend (the high school girls’ book group I run at Little Shop of Stories), to discuss My Most Excellent Year. I was expecting a really huge, gushing response; this, after all, was a book requested by another member who absolutely loved it, and two other Little Shoppers could not shut up about it when they read it, either.

This was not the case: two different Mixers felt the book was “boring.” The overall feeling was that the book was too realistic. This made it, they explained, really really good, but because it was so good at being realistic, it became uninteresting. So uninteresting, in fact, that they couldn’t even finish it, and get to the ending which, to me, is pretty darn fantastical.

I had to puzzle over this. Because the thing I love best about fiction is when it manages to be incredibly real. I’m not the biggest fan of fantasy, I admit, because . . . well . . . everything is just made up. (Clarification: I do like some fantasy. But I like it when the magic is grounded in real things.) In general though it’s more interesting to me –more challenging– when writers manage to convey situations, characters, problems, and settings that are so true you feel like you know them yourself. This to me is part of the power of the book: to speak from one stranger to another and convey whole worlds of reality–enough so that an understanding passes between them.

But The Mix isn’t the only book group I lead that has expressed this disinterest in “real life” fiction. (And to be fair to them, The Mix does love a good memoir.) My book group for middle school girls, Page Turners, also prefers the fantastical adventure or mystery. I have lots of theories about why this may be so, but I put the question out to the blogosphere tonight: what is it about fantasy, and what is it about realism, that makes one more preferable to the other?