Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts
Book Review: Piglet by Lottie Hazel
OFFICIAL BOOK BLURB: Piglet is judging the contents of your shopping trolley. She is listening to what you order for lunch and is observing whether the dessert you serve is homemade or snatched from a packet. There isn't another 31-year-old that takes food more seriously. And who could blame her, with a childhood nickname like that?
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AUTHOR INFORMATION: Charlotte has been writing novels since she was fourteen. She spends most of her time imagining far distant lands full of intrigue and danger. Her first series 'The Strangers of Paragor' is an epic fantasy adventure for kids, and was published when she was seventeen. She has since gone on to write two new series for adults - 'The Chronicles of Kaya' and 'The Cure'. Both are full of sweeping romance, courageous heroes and dystopian struggles. She has a masters degree in screenwriting from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and won the Australian Writer's Guild Award for Best Unproduced Screenplay in 2013.
Official Author Website
Buy Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons HERE(USA) or HERE(UK)
Buy Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons HERE(USA) or HERE(UK)
Read FBC's review of As I Was on My Way to Strawberry Fair
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of Quest of the Five Clans series and The Scaled Tartan
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Origin of Birds in The Footprints of Writing
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Origin of Birds in The Footprints of Writing
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Stations of Angels
Author information: Raymond St. Elmo is a computer programmer living in Texas. A degree in Spanish Literature gave him a love of magic realism. A fascination with artificial intelligence gave him a job. His books tend to be first-person fantastical accounts with frequent references to William Blake, Borges and PKD.
Format: Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons was self-published by the author on July 30, 2016, and is available through Kindle Unlimited and in ebook and paperback formats. It counts 414 pages.
Review: Raymond St. Elmo’s writing is often magical and creative, which is a delicate way to say it’s totally wackadoo:) It makes me laugh while, simultaneously, it laughs at conventions and doesn’t pay any attention to what sells at the moment. As the title suggests, Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons is a weird book and its narrative requires certain patience from the reader.
The writing is excellent and shows the author stretching his abilities. Told primarily as an interview between the protagonist and mysterious interviewers, it’s a time travel book, but not in the usual sense. The adventure starts at the board of Unicorn (a ship) as it sails upon the Sea of Suns and Moons. An ancient poet-turned-sailor, Clarence St. Elmo, shares vignettes of the voyage that ended in a shipwreck caused by unnatural storm. St. Elmo survived but found himself washed up at the shores of Theodosia, the island of dead gods inhabited by mythological terrors.
It’s an adventure story. And a love story told through letters. A story of lovers torn apart, but also a love letter to stories and storytelling. It’s often confusing, but also funny. It’s weird, but also immersive. It throws a lot to the mix - adventure, satire, humor, romance, fantasy, mythology and makes it work. There’s also a cargo of dead gods who are perhaps not as dead as everyone believes. And a haunted cemetery.
So far I have performed a dark ritual in a cemetery, escaped a theological asylum, been locked in a dungeon for arguing at lunch, and run from unnatural dogs through a labyrinth. Checking my schedule, I see that tomorrow morning I am to fight a duel to the death. And yet, for all the theatre of my current residence, my attention keeps slipping. Gods, dogs and duels: they must clear their throats to recall my attention. Else my mind turns towards home, and a poem there I left unfinished.
I love St. Elmo’s dry, insightful humor. It makes me giggle. As for the story and plot - they ask for attention; the narrative requires it. The interviewing committee repeats some questions and answers differ or add to what Clarence has already said. But it also tells a story within a story. The interviewer claims the narrator is the blind old man, but it’s not as simple as that. It never is.
Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons is a weird and unique book with a convoluted plot and unusual narration. It won’t appeal to readers looking for a well-pronounced plotline and quick pacing. Probably even fans of literary fiction will find it infuriating at times. And yet it’s the book worth trying as once you start to get into it you probably won’t want to leave.
Monday, May 4, 2020
The Origin of Birds in The Footprints of Writing by Raymond St. Elmo (reviewed by Lukasz Przywoski)
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of Quest of the Five Clans series
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Stations of Angels
Order Borne over HERE(USA) or HERE(UK)
OFFICIAL AUTHOR INFORMATION: VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.
Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.
FORMAT/INFO: Borne is 336 pages long. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 25, 2017.
OVERVIEW: Imagine a wasteland seething with the weirdest kind of flora, fauna, and biotech. Imagine the unimaginable and you’ll get close. Borne, set in a ruined, nameless city at some point in the not-too-distant future, paints a world in which civilization has collapsed as a result of environmental degradation.
Survivors are terrorized by Mord, a massive flying bear more than five stories high. Mord once prowled the corridors of the biotech organization known as the Company, which lies at the outskirts of the city, until he was experimented on, grew large, learned to fly and broke free. Apart from being an insane monster, he provides also sustenance as sometimes some food or biotech can be found on him. When he’s asleep, scavengers try to “feed” on him. One of them, a woman named Rachel, finds a mysterious creature entangled in the fur of Mord. At first Borne looks like a green lump, but later on, he’s described as:
a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin. The texture was as smooth as waterworn stone, if a bit rubbery. It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passionflowers.
Rachel brings Borne home – to a decaying apartment complex she shares with her lover Wick, who used to work for the Company. Wick produces biotech drugs – mainly beetles that can be swallowed or stuck in the ear, and then release powerful memories of other people’s happier times or pull out forgotten memories from the user’s own mind—or just produce beautiful visions that provide an escape from the barren, craterous landscapes of the city.
Soon, Rachel discovers that small green lump transforms into sentient, rapidly growing and utterly inhuman life-form. Borne grows fast, it starts not only to think and read about the world but also "sample" living things, absorbing people and their experiences whole.
At its core, Borne is a novel about human relationships and limits of cognition – Rachel who has five senses try to communicate with the creature that perceives the world through nine senses. Playing with the concepts of dark and light, good and evil in its backdrop, the book focuses on Rachel and Wick as they try to survive in the savage world and figure out what’s between them. Rachel seeks some kind of sense in all of this. Not an easy task in a decaying world. For some time raising Borne gives a sense of direction. But it won’t last. Children grow and turn into teenagers, teenagers tend to rebel and leave their houses.
Borne is alien and he doesn’t have a knack for assimilating the rules of what is right and what is wrong. By nature, he’s a supernatural predator, by his upbringing wannabe pacifist. It won’t work.
The prose is smart and poetic in places. Especially when describing decaying wasteland or shapes Borne takes at a given moment. It’s not particularly flowery, it’s just very visual. On the other hand, it’s not very dynamic and, given that the pacing is a bit slow in places, the narrative lacks a certain punch that would make it stronger. Additionally, a lot of things are simply told and not shown (when Rachel speaks about Wick’s anger, sadness, etc). I guess the focus of the book lies elsewhere, it’s more about intellectual adventure than tight plotting.
While I usually don’t particularly like descriptions, it’s not the case this time. The world described by the author is easy to visualize and disturbing at the same time. My imagination was challenged in good way.
Having said that, the plot itself lacks tension and drama. The book lacks some cohesive mystery that would make a reader turn pages. I turned them because I was hooked by the world. The plot, though, wasn’t as interesting as the descriptions of the city and relationship dynamics between characters.
Overall, I’m rather impressed. The detailed and strange post-apocalyptic landscape presented in Borne is fascinating and unsettling. The city is a weird, artificial ecosystem in which bioengineered organisms live alongside buildings, people, and pollution, finding their place in this strange new hierarchy. Borne contains bleak moments, but it also shows light-hearted moments reminiscent of E.T. It’s creepy but entertaining.
I think it won’t appeal to people who enjoy fast pacing and tight plotting. On the other hand, I’m such a person and yet I enjoyed the book quite a bit.
I think it’s a book worth trying, especially if you want to taste New Weird subgenre (although VanderMeer work is also called Bio-Punk or Ecological Uncanny).
If, however, you happen to be a bear – don’t read this book. It may misrepresent your formidable species.
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