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| Hearsay: |
An 11-year-old Chinese girl emailed her manuscript to the head of HarperCollins and got a global book deal. You can use my rope once you cut me down.
Fan has since been hailed as a prodigy by her editors who will use her book in a new attempt to establish the firm in China. Her story, Swordbird, is an epic allegory about the struggle for peace and will be printed in this country in the new year. Those who have seen it talk about it as the product of a mind as imaginative as some of the greatest names in children’s writing.
The key word here is “use”. In keeping with its corporate profile, HarperCollins has agreed to advance Nancy Yi Fan three times as much as it pays most of its Chinese workers ($1.82) and will occasionally let her out of the sweatshop where Rupert’s shoes are sewn with the hair of her siblings as he sits on the back of her parents. (Of course, none of this joking is fair to what seems to be a bright, driven young lady and her family, so I wish her all the best for her bravery and success. But it is, however, quite fair to Rupert and I wish him a long fall from a short pier.)
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September 26th, 2006 at 6:55 am
I’m trying not to be cynical about: “This summer HarperCollins announced it would be publishing a series of Chinese works overseas, as well as bringing out Swordbird in the United States, the UK and China and launching Cidian.cn, an online Collins English-Chinese dictionary.” I’m sure that the publicity surrounding these two events is purely coincidental. You know how innocent these marketing types are…
September 26th, 2006 at 7:00 am
While part of me suspects this little girl had some “help from a grown-up” in writing this book, the other part of my cringes for the day she has her moment of Royal-Tenenbaum realization, that she’s a Wunderkind who failed to become anything more than a durchschnittlicher Erwachsener.
September 26th, 2006 at 7:06 am
Guys, it’s unfair to write her off like this. She’s just a driven kid who got “lucky”. It’s not the little girl who’s at fault here. It’s the circling HC buzzards. Mark has it right — it’s the tank and those driving it what does the killin’, not the people it drives over.
September 26th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
Exactly, George. That’s why I cringe.
September 28th, 2006 at 8:56 am
I’m patiently waiting for the moment when we find out the girl doesn’t exist, and its all a marketing ploy. Might sound pessimistic, and I really hope she is just a prodigy that got lucky, but I find it unlikely.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Swordbird is a wonderful book. I have read the advance reader’s edition.
June 5th, 2007 at 10:24 am
I”m fourteen and I love anthropomorphic books. My favorite book is Watership Down. I love Warriors and Redwall. The poppy series was good, and Varjack Paw was good too. However, Swordbird pales in comparison, although it has been compared to Watership.
I thought the characters in Swordbird were shallow and unrealistic. the Characters in Redwall and Warriors are more real and have more depth. The book was mindless fluff and I didn’t connect with the Characters and I didn’t care about them at all. The battles were not bloody or realistic like Redwall, and the bird who died had a horrendously sappy death scene.
This book was awful, terrible, and cheesy. It felt like a Redwall knock-off.