#tagcat

Filomena

Tiger

Lily and Hazel

Apollo and Artemis

If you’re looking for a popular book to dip your toes into the unreliable narrator trope, try Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a thriller about a missing wife and the man who may have done it. Maybe you want to know whodunnit between a group of four in high school detention, try One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus. For something a little more classic, look up The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath about a woman going mad. If you're a fan of Toni Morrison, check out her award-winning novel Jazz about a salesman who murders his teenage lover. For less of a murder mystery vibe, try Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, a cult classic about an underground boxing club. And finally, if you’re looking for a self-professed unreliable narrator, give Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney a try.

TagCat just turned two! Our little mascot should be able to climb stairs, speak in short sentences, and draw circles and (straight-ish) lines. 

But seriously, we’d like to thank everyone that has helped us on this mad little project, from those that were there at the very start to the ones who joined in the last few months. We appreciate every one of you. 

Snapdragon by Kat Leyh is a magical realism graphic novel for a middle grade audience about a young girl who befriends the town’s witch to learn magic. 

Snapdragon follows a tomboy who has rescued baby opossums and needs help caring for them, so she approaches the old woman who lives in the forest for help. With a host of side characters including a trans girl, a single mother, and a three-legged dog, Snapdragon explores friendship and belonging. 

For fanfiction readers, the holy grail of content is Archive of Our Own (AO3), a non-profit website that hosts fan-produced works for free. It’s an incredible site, built and run entirely by volunteers, that has one of the best (if not the best) tagging systems for literature currently available. Readers got used to being able to search for the content they liked best while having clear content warnings. It led to the question: why can’t published fiction be tagged like this?

That idea is what started TagCat, and we’re excited to be standing on the shoulders of giants, but we’ve also noticed some confusion about if we’re going to be an exact copy of AO3 or if our features will work exactly the same way. We’d like to talk today about some of the ways that we’re different from AO3.

Obviously, the first difference is the content that we’re tagging. AO3 is almost exclusively fan-generated content for existing intellectual properties (with some original work). TagCat will be for published fiction works (with plans to later branch out to non-fiction, poetry, visual media, and maybe more!). Because of this difference in content, we also tag characters and relationships differently. Character names are only helpful when you are already familiar with the characters, so we don’t name, but describe them. You won’t find Harry/Ginny tagged, but you may see Male/Female Romance and Dating a Friend’s Sister.

The next difference is that readers will tag the works, not the authors. Users will enter tags, set their relevance levels, spoileriness, and any modifiers. Users can then participate in the moderation process by disputing tags that don’t belong on the work or that are tagged inappropriately as spoilers (or the other way around). We’ve tossed around some ideas for official author-participation, but readers will always be the main generators of tags. If you’re an author who has ideas on how you’d like to participate in the site, send us a message or email.

AO3 has a great system for “wrangling” their tags since they allow free-form tags to be added to works. During this process, “wranglers” decide whether a tag becomes “canon,” and set implications and aliases so searching by different spellings or phrasings will show the same results. While we have a similar system of setting implications, TagCat is aiming for a more consistent and uniform set of tags without the free-style comment type tags common on AO3. Forcing all tags to go through a moderation process when they’re added means that we can set implications and that you won’t find both heterosexual relationship and straight romance on the same book since they would be “groomed” (our version of wrangling) to be the same tag.

The last difference we want to cover today is the number of tags. A story on AO3 is well-tagged if it has 30 tags, but we’ve been finding that well-tagged books on TagCat have 80+ tags. Many of the tags are frequently not needed on AO3 like character descriptions and setting tags, but they’re useful on books you’ve never read before. The number of tags also leads us to display them differently. Instead of seeing tags in the order they were added, tags are displayed in tag blocks and then sorted by type and relevance within those.

This week’s featured book is The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi, a historical fantasy heist YA novel with a diverse cast. This novel is the first book in a trilogy, and the second book is out later this year.

The Gilded Wolves takes place in Paris, 1889 as the city prepares for the World Fair. The story follows a found family of teenagers that includes a mixed race hotelier, an Indian baker, a Filipino/Spanish bi historian, a Jewish, autistic scientist, and a traumatized gardener. The overarching plot is an item retrieval quest with several smaller heists along the way. 

First Test is a YA fantasy novel about an 11-year-old girl who is the first girl in centuries to try for her knighthood. The protagonist is principled and determined, and she forms multiple girl-boy friendships with her fellow pages. The novel has a strong themes of bullying, misogyny, and justice.

Since the plot revolves around her page training, there are lots of tags about those activities like drill practice, tree climbing, and final exams. The protagonist is breaking the glass ceiling in a way, so there’s also a lot of sensitive content including a derogatory nickname, body shaming, and all kinds of bumps and bruises.

If you like this book page, check out our other examples at TagCat.org!

If you’re in the mood for an atmospheric horror short story collection this October, you might want to check out Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James. This classic anthology of eight stories has a campfire or Christmas Eve storytelling feel meant to be read aloud. 

Each of the stories is told as a secondhand tale, and the stories frequently revolve around an ancient artifact that somehow summons the supernatural which ends poorly. Among the stories, there is a nobleman, a witch trial, revenge from beyond the grave, and golf. M.R. James includes a lot of biblical references and sets the stories in various European towns.