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A review by brianh1987
Jay's Journal by Beatrice Sparks
1.0
Color me angry. I bought this book a year ago at Barnes & Noble from the YA section. Its description on the back of the book sounded interesting, if flamboyant: this is the journal of a boy who got in over his head with drugs and the occult before killing himself. All right, I'm interested.
So today, 23 February 2014, I finally picked it up to read. I was moving along quite quickly, being that the journal format leaves a lot of white space on the pages. But I stopped at page 100, ready to put it down for the day, before skipping to the back to read the excerpt from Sparks' other book, Go Ask Alice, which the cover and inside strongly want we, the readers, to go out and buy. This didn't feel right to me. I half-jokingly described to my room mate on his way out to work, that the book in my hand was the product of some woman who was making a living by exploiting the pain and deaths of troubled youths. And I was sort of right. When I put the book down all of 20 minutes ago, I went to the internet to see what I could dig up in regards to what edits were made. The author, after all, stated clearly in the beginning that she had done interviews with friends and family to fill out what might have been missing from "Jay's" own account.
And, if you've read any other reviews on this page, you won't be shocked to find out that the woman did practically no interviews, especially not with anyone of import, and that not just a few pieces, but the great bulk of the book is all fabricated bullshit. According to Wikipedia, the woman used only 25 of 212 (the number varies depending on source, but that's about the ratio) journal entries from "Jay", and just...well, invented the rest. I saw one person on here say she got a lot of the occult material from clients of hers, but that is beside the point. I, the consumer, was lied to about the content I was paying money for. I, the intellectual, was being lied to about the content I was consuming. The entire Barrett family were lied to, and in fact largely destroyed by the lies and character smears in this book. As I said to my room mate: Beatrice Sparks was simply making money by laying waste to the reputation of a dead boy.
I can understand something of such low journalistic integrity being published way-back-when, before the internet, before you could expose liars in a matter of moments. But why is this still around? For god's sake, my copy was printed in 2010. 2010! This is inexcusable.
And here, don't I feel like a jackass for reading the lines about levitation and auras and thinking, "well of course there's some logical explanation that "Jay" simply didn't see." There was nothing to logically examine, of course! The bitch made the whole damned thing up! Does anyone else wonder if she has trouble sleeping at night? Because I bet she sleeps like a fucking baby.
[Edit: I see now from her mini-bio that Sparks is no longer among the living. Thank god for that.]
So today, 23 February 2014, I finally picked it up to read. I was moving along quite quickly, being that the journal format leaves a lot of white space on the pages. But I stopped at page 100, ready to put it down for the day, before skipping to the back to read the excerpt from Sparks' other book, Go Ask Alice, which the cover and inside strongly want we, the readers, to go out and buy. This didn't feel right to me. I half-jokingly described to my room mate on his way out to work, that the book in my hand was the product of some woman who was making a living by exploiting the pain and deaths of troubled youths. And I was sort of right. When I put the book down all of 20 minutes ago, I went to the internet to see what I could dig up in regards to what edits were made. The author, after all, stated clearly in the beginning that she had done interviews with friends and family to fill out what might have been missing from "Jay's" own account.
And, if you've read any other reviews on this page, you won't be shocked to find out that the woman did practically no interviews, especially not with anyone of import, and that not just a few pieces, but the great bulk of the book is all fabricated bullshit. According to Wikipedia, the woman used only 25 of 212 (the number varies depending on source, but that's about the ratio) journal entries from "Jay", and just...well, invented the rest. I saw one person on here say she got a lot of the occult material from clients of hers, but that is beside the point. I, the consumer, was lied to about the content I was paying money for. I, the intellectual, was being lied to about the content I was consuming. The entire Barrett family were lied to, and in fact largely destroyed by the lies and character smears in this book. As I said to my room mate: Beatrice Sparks was simply making money by laying waste to the reputation of a dead boy.
I can understand something of such low journalistic integrity being published way-back-when, before the internet, before you could expose liars in a matter of moments. But why is this still around? For god's sake, my copy was printed in 2010. 2010! This is inexcusable.
And here, don't I feel like a jackass for reading the lines about levitation and auras and thinking, "well of course there's some logical explanation that "Jay" simply didn't see." There was nothing to logically examine, of course! The bitch made the whole damned thing up! Does anyone else wonder if she has trouble sleeping at night? Because I bet she sleeps like a fucking baby.
[Edit: I see now from her mini-bio that Sparks is no longer among the living. Thank god for that.]