The protagonist, and some of the other characters for that matter, don’t feel entirely real. I myself just treated Hanna’s view point as literal, and everything she saw as factual. There could be an argument that the entire book was some sort of delusion. The choice of using such a fractured POV character was interesting. The supernatural flavor was really interesting and unique, reminding me ever so slightly of something like the eerie Lost Room, or the wonderful but very out of print Marianne series by Sherri S Tepper. Certainly someone who likes their reality… well… real, would be put off by the book. We won’t even count the movies and TV shows. I mean, I’ve read A LOT (5000+ speculative novels), and played hundreds if not thousands of video games with magical systems etc.
Now I do wonder if someone with less experience reading speculative fiction in all its forms might have trouble with this novel. Occasionally she violates POV slightly on the side of clarity because the protagonist is new to this stuff and she explains it with a bit more understanding than she might be expected to have. And it’s compact too, not being a very long book and containing dozens of strange encounters. For example, sound sucking, student grabbing, invisible squids live inside the high school windows and one of the characters defeats them with a deck of playing cards! It’s a tribute to her skill that I could follow nearly all of this stuff. She doesn’t feel the need to combine herself to easy concepts either. Reeves uses the protagonist and POV character very deftly to explain it, or mostly just show what happens. Not exactly in the lyrical kind of way that you might expect, but because of their deft wit, and quick and creative way of describing utterly fantastic goings on.īecause this book is FILLED, PACKED, STUFFED, with weird monsters and magic. Some sentences were fantastic (both literally and figuratively). It’s first person past, but with a sort of cavalier devil-take-care crazy-girl style. She lives in some kind of weird place in Texas where gates between universes have let all sorts of strange monsters and realities in. But her mom doesn’t live in a normal town.
Nominally, it’s about a schizophrenic girl, Hanna, who’s dad has died and who decides to move in unannounced with her mom she’s never met. The asylum was boring, and it was hard to talk to Poppa there.This is a weird weird book, and I mean that in a good way.
0 kommentar(er)
