Reading Wednesday
Sparrow Hill Road - Rose Marshall is a ghost, and her story is not told in a linear fashion. As she interacts with truck drivers & other people on the road (she is a hitchhiker ghost), we learn about her past: how she died, and what's happened to her during her afterlife.
The worldbuilding is interesting, the way highways and roads are both real & not. The rules for various types of ghosts, etc. Rose is a very likeable protagonist. We see her most often in greasy diners, one specifically called Last Chance, which isn't fixed & seems to move around just as much as she does.
I sometimes find the writing to verge on the edge of cliche, but it never fully dips down into making me feel embarrasssed. And McGuire's writing sucks me in. I read the second half straight through, couldn't put it down.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Shortlisted for the Booker, and rightfully so. The narrator's voice is both matter of fact and nonlinear. Unreliable, but honest. It's best to not know what's coming, so I'm purposely being a little obtuse.
I know of Fowler from WisCon, as she has attended many times in the past, and in fact co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
There were references to Jo, Amy, and Beth from Little Women. But I didn't know how badly I needed to see Dicey Tillerman in a list of orphaned girls like Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley until she was. A genre of buldingsromans that had always felt coherent but disparate to me suddenly snapped together.
There are allusions to Star Wars throughout. I also enjoyed the comparison of Merry and Pippin in Isengard to the Romans sitting amid the ruins of Carthage.
I work with human subjects research for a living, and this book made me reflect upon animal research more than anything has before. It's timely, too. Last week, there was a semi-heinous Isthmus cover story called MOTHERLESS MONKEYS (http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=43284) about a new study at UW in which rhesus monkeys will be taken from their mothers at a young age, and killed one year later in a research study about anxiety & depression.
There's a human counterpart study related to that one: in the human study, babies go into an MRI scanner instead of having their brains cut up.
It was hard to put this book down. It pulls at you, & doesn't let go. The ending is perfect.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there.
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The worldbuilding is interesting, the way highways and roads are both real & not. The rules for various types of ghosts, etc. Rose is a very likeable protagonist. We see her most often in greasy diners, one specifically called Last Chance, which isn't fixed & seems to move around just as much as she does.
I sometimes find the writing to verge on the edge of cliche, but it never fully dips down into making me feel embarrasssed. And McGuire's writing sucks me in. I read the second half straight through, couldn't put it down.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Shortlisted for the Booker, and rightfully so. The narrator's voice is both matter of fact and nonlinear. Unreliable, but honest. It's best to not know what's coming, so I'm purposely being a little obtuse.
I know of Fowler from WisCon, as she has attended many times in the past, and in fact co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
There were references to Jo, Amy, and Beth from Little Women. But I didn't know how badly I needed to see Dicey Tillerman in a list of orphaned girls like Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley until she was. A genre of buldingsromans that had always felt coherent but disparate to me suddenly snapped together.
There are allusions to Star Wars throughout. I also enjoyed the comparison of Merry and Pippin in Isengard to the Romans sitting amid the ruins of Carthage.
I work with human subjects research for a living, and this book made me reflect upon animal research more than anything has before. It's timely, too. Last week, there was a semi-heinous Isthmus cover story called MOTHERLESS MONKEYS (http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=43284) about a new study at UW in which rhesus monkeys will be taken from their mothers at a young age, and killed one year later in a research study about anxiety & depression.
There's a human counterpart study related to that one: in the human study, babies go into an MRI scanner instead of having their brains cut up.
It was hard to put this book down. It pulls at you, & doesn't let go. The ending is perfect.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there.
There are <
> comments on this post at Dreamwidth.