Okay, I read this over a month ago and my brain has been so completely in another place since then. Obsolete reviews are fun! Let’s do this, with a generous assist from Goodreads: “The Edge lies between worlds, on the border between the Broken, where people shop at Walmart and magic is a fairytale–and the Weird, where blueblood aristocrats rule, changelings roam, and the strength of your magic can change your destiny… Cerise Mar and her unruly clan are cash poor but land rich, claiming […]
“Running, I soon realized, was the best way to stay ahead of fear.”
In her author’s note, Margot Livesey states quite plainly that the source of inspiration for this book “should be obvious.” It’s been long enough since I’ve read Jane Eyre that I didn’t get to play the details pedant, but The Flight of Gemma Hardy so closely matches the main events of its classic predecessor that my foggy memory had no trouble recalling parallel characters, locations, and plot points once re-imagined through Gemma’s steps. The set-up is familiar: Gemma is orphaned and raised by family members who […]
Two more novellas, which were a more successful venture than the last two
I definitely should not have spent a bunch of time in my last review bloviating about whether I like novellas or not, because it seems they’re all I have time to read recently. I’ve been waiting a long time for both of these to come off hold at the library, and perhaps it was the waiting making the reward all the sweeter, but these stories were both really enjoyable. I am not sure how else I can wax all poetical about the loveliness of Tessa […]
“Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.”
Writing 52+ reviews is hard. Writing 52+ reviews is harder when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation, and not reviews. Oops! Well, anyway, here we are. The Gone-Away World is a very strange book. It’s also a very good book, but it’s a good book that took me awhile to get into and appreciate. Harkaway’s prose is witty and often nonsensical, filled with non-sequiturs and descriptions that seem to mean absolutely nothing, and yet somehow conjure a well-staged — if surrealistic — scene, and […]