Written by Steven Espinoza, Chris Vander-Kaay,
Kathleen Fernandez-Vander Kaay
Published by Laurence King Publishing
I’ve seen a number of books like Spoiler Alert in recent years.
They’re all oh, so clever and beautifully designed but at their heart, there IS no heart!
Just fluff.
And I’m sorry to say that’s all I found Spoiler Alert to be as well, just clever, heartless fluff.
The simple premise of Spoiler Alert is that each of 38 types of movies—not genres exactly but… Things like Young Adult Dystopian Romance, Spaceship Thriller, Creepy Kid Film, or Inspirational Teacher Drama.
Each type gets six color-coded pages which humorously (supposedly) detail clichés, tropes, and stereotypes of that particular style of picture to essentially lay out a completely generic film of that type.
A number of individual entries borrow too liberally and specifically from a recognizable movie for that section to seem generic.
The Time Travel section, for instance all too obviously uses Back to the Future as its template for generic when it most certainly wasn’t generic when it came out.
As I said, there is some cleverness to many of the sections but the best part is the artwork—both the simplistic illustrations of the chapters and more specifically the faux generic movie posters that head up each new section.
All in all, while I didn’t feel as though reading this was a total waste of my time, like the other, similar books I read when I worked int bookstores, I doubt I’ll even remember Spoiler Alert at all for very long.
(On an almost completed unrelated note, I’m really impressed with the design of the logo of the publisher, Laurence King Publishing Ltd.)
