Featue & Follow Friday (#5)

Feature & Follow is hosted by Parajunkee of Parajunkee's View and Alison of Alison Can Read.  Each host will have their own Feature Blog and this way it’ll allow us to show off more new blogs!

Question of the Week:  Do you mind books with similar ideas to other books? Similar concepts, backgrounds, retellings or pulled-to-publish fanfic?

A: As long as the book is its own distinct work, then yes.  I think I love fairy tale retelling more than other books because they play on the fact that it is working off of something else.  I think that came out weird… what I mean is with retellings, you have those “Oic wut u did thar” moments where they incorporate the old myths and stories into another completely new story.  I love it when authors pull something from an old story and stick it into the modern world in a way that works.

With books that aren’t supposed to be a retelling and are just similar, I think as long as it’s not blaringly obvious, I don’t mind if two books are alike.  For example, I found a lot of similarities in Lauren Oliver’s Delirium to Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series.  But while reading I wasn’t put off by it -- it was more of a “Huh, I wonder if Lauren Oliver read Uglies.”

I haven’t read any pulled-to-publish fanfic that I know of, so I don’t have much of an opinion on it.