Book Report: Goose Chase

Much of YHB’s reading lately has been heavy, in one way or another, so when Patrice Kindl’s delightful Goose Girl caught my eye at the library recently, I picked it up. Not only that, but I brought it home, and I read it. So there. It probably took as long to check it out, take it home and bring it back as it did to reread it, but there’s nothing wrong with a quick read.

OK, but here’s the clever part. This book is called Goose Girl, and I read it a while ago, back before I was logging all the books I read. There’s another book called The Goose Girl, which as far as I can tell I have never read. It’s that second book, the one with the article in the title, that was written by Shannon Hale, who wrote the wonderful Princess Academy and the perfectly good River of Secrets. YHB’s comments about Goose Girl in that part of the Tohu Bohu are mistakes. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Sad, yes? But like New! Coke, the real lesson is that mistakes, even silly-ass mistakes like confusing Goose Girl with The Goose Girl or confusing Pepsi’s sudden access to Frito-Lay’s distribution network with a taste-related market-share problem, can lead to positive outcomes. Well, not always, of course. Usually silly-ass mistakes just lead to wasting a lot of time and money and energy cleaning up your mess. And I’m not really sure in what sense Coca-Cola-Co’s continued dominance of the soft-drink market is a positive outcome.

You know what? Never mind that last bit. It wasn’t the clever part at all.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Edited to add: Er, in point of fact, Ms. Kindl's book appears to be called Goose Chase. Perhaps that was the clever part.