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piiskoor

Another fine mess

Reader fan critic teacher reader fan.

Currently reading

McGlue
Ottessa Moshfegh
Knife Fight and Other Struggles
David Nickle
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon
The Good Lord Bird
James McBride
Ancillary Justice
Ann Leckie
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
Derek Bok
Dissident Gardens
Jonathan Lethem
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
Kim Newman
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick
Complete Novels
Dashiell Hammett, Steven Marcus
The Reapers Are the Angels - Alden Bell Stephanie's review seems to get it exactly right--there are moments of intriguing prose, and the book zips along through its short running time. But I don't think I'm an ideal source for a review--the book hit me just as a bit less effective than it seemed to hit her, so... maybe check hers out. She notes that it feels derivative, stitched together from a number of influences, but she liked the Southern Gothic sensibility...

...but I felt even that smelt derivative. A young preternaturally zombie-killing-gifted girl roams about a (familiar) end-times space, occasionally running into slivers of civilization, said social structures always bleakly trapped inside finger-quotes, unfortunately burdened with the foregone grotesqueries of the post-apocalyptic picaresque: every bit of order, shored up against the chaos, is really sick itself. See?

The girl, in addition to a ghurka knife, has a sharp gothic Moral vision built from scraps left behind by F. O'Connor.

I'm whining a bit--every now and then there would be a sentence that wasn't trying so hard, that kicked like a strange strong liquor. But I read a good number of books, see a goodly number of movies (just saw the equally pretty but vacuous Book of Eli) that read a good bit just like this one, and it seemed a little too tailor-made. However on another day, in a different mood, I might have leaned a little higher. If you're at all interested--I would say give it a look for yourself.