The first cut is the deepest - Books - Times Online
Westerfield has created a gripping thriller about a dystopia founded on ideas of beauty, with all the gadgets, urban planning, moral dilemmas and medical disasters of superior science fiction.
Amanda Craig on Scott Westerfield's Pretties. Her Saturday review column in The Times also included (slightly less enthusiastic) comment on Sara's Face by Melvin Burgess.
While at Hay, Sherry Ashworth spoke to me about my recent comment about my not entirely trusting Craig's taste. I said that at least there was a consistent critical viewpoint in The Times, as opposed to The Guardian, which continues to use a host of mainly peer reviewers. Ashworth said that, as an author, she preferred The Guardian's approach, because it made her feel that at least her kind of novel stood a chance of being reviewed in The Guardian, whereas she felt (probably correctly) that Craig is not best disposed towards her brand of fiction.
I still feel very strongly that the reviewing of children's fiction deserves to be put on the same footing as, say, film reviews. In other words, a selection of recently published novels (not, as so often happens, a themed selection) should be reviewed by a regular reviewer, whose critical tastes and standpoint become familiar to readers. The Guardian Review page continues to distress me in this regard.
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