I tried Swamplandia! again and just decided that it wasn’t for me. Is this a trick of being a grown-up? Even books you can see are good, if you don’t like them, you just move on.
Anyway, I read two good ones yesterday (obviously, they’re quick reads), that I heard about on the SciFi Squeecast.
1. Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord, which is just a beautiful contemporary fairytale about a woman who gets the power of chaos. I especially love it because Lord has a narrative strategy that I’ve often adopted and found it really engaging, myself, but then chickened out when revising. And yet, Lord just wields it so expertly that I feel like maybe the problem is not that it’s not a good strategy, but that I’m a chickenshit.
2. The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe, a fantasy novel about an Iraq War veteran who comes home to East Tennessee and has to tell her family, a ghost, and the rest of her clan to fuck off. I looked online and I don’t see any reviews of this except at Chapter 16 for a book by a guy who was born and raised in Tennessee and wrote a book set in a thinly-veiled East Tennessee (it’s funny, Johnson City gets to be Johnson City but Rugby is Cricket), which is a shame, because it’s really wonderful. I’m not really into stories about the supernatural beings featured in this book, but apparently my desire–which I didn’t even know I had–to read really good stories about Tennessee overcomes my desire to not read stories about these supernatural beings.
Anyway, I liked them both.
Tiny Cat Pants 