The one match 
of the quarterfinals where I did not successfully choose the matchup, thanks to Liars getting the nod over The Wedding People. So in the real-life matchup, we have Liars over Margo’s Got Money Troubles and while Margo has occasional issues with its structure, it at least didn’t feel like a giant lump of undigested autobiography like Liars did, so I would pick it to advance in this matchup.
Meanwhile in the parallel universe
if the matchup were between The Wedding People and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, I would pick The Wedding People to advance. It may well be a case of reading something a bit confectionary in the aftermath of last year’s elections, but even so, I still enjoyed that book more. It was often predictable in ways that Margo’s Got Money Troubles was not, but it just felt pleasant.
My judgment on the judgment
Coming to Emily Hughes’s judgment, I was left with the question of whether she would manage to buck the trend of advancing Liars. Fortunately, she found the one-sidedness of Liars as problematic as I did (although she didn’t see an easy solution to the problem) and actually liked the formal experimentation of Margo’s Got Money Troubles that I hated enough to go back and remove something similar from my own work in progress.
The match commentary a while back indicated that The Wedding People was not going to be reappearing in the zombie round (unlike last year when the zombies were books that I liked and wanted to see in the finals but were eliminated earlier), but overall the matches are going the way I would have liked them to go.
Leave a Reply