{"id":3376,"date":"2025-10-12T18:45:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T02:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3376"},"modified":"2025-10-12T18:45:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T02:45:11","slug":"review-kill-your-darlings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3376","title":{"rendered":"Review: Kill Your Darlings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Peter Swanson has put together a book that&#8217;s a little bit murder mystery, a little bit character study, and &#8211; for me &#8211; a little bit nostalgia trip.  <em>Kill Your Darlings<\/em> starts with a murder and follows our characters back through time to show how we got here.  He does a nice job both telling us who they are and what happened to lead us to the events that start the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s a little bit of a gimmick to work backward through time.  I think it works pretty well here, partially because of the murder mystery connection.  A mystery reader who found the style gimmicky could still imagine the building flashbacks as facts uncovered in investigation.  I thought it was a reasonable way to build the characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Swanson ties his characters to specific ages and dates that are within a year of my birth.  He also takes them on a junior high trip to DC that I also took.  I wind up feeling a bit of extra nostalgia for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Overall an interesting story told with some panache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Swanson has put together a book that&#8217;s a little bit murder mystery, a little bit character study, and &#8211; for me &#8211; a little bit nostalgia trip. Kill Your Darlings starts with a murder and follows our characters back through time to show how we got here. He does a nice job both telling [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-general","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3377,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions\/3377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}