In the beginning, Joel gets a new job. It's a moment that might be filled with potential, promise. He could be the figure on the cover of the novel, leaping into the air. Alternatively, Joel could be that figure on the cover and be plummeting to the earth, about to
Girl Cave Rose. Prince Dark Mirror. Crow Cellar Ring. One has the sense that Helen Oyeyemi thinks in threes. Also that she views the world through a slightly skewed lens. Hamish Hamilton - Penguin, 2014 But Boy, Snow, Bird is not simply a random collection of resonant images
A Stephen King blurb. And, it's declared: a novel of terror. Nick Cutter's readers know what they're in for. And, if there was any doubt, little clues speckle the first few chapters. Readers are "waiting for unknown wickedness". There are shadows coalescing into permanence and logs groaning. There is a sheet
When I was in high school, I read Fran Arrick's Steffie Can't Come Out to Play (1978) more than once. I even wrote a book report on it in the ninth grade, when the assigned reading included J. Meade Falkner's Moonfleet and Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners. (Wanted: female characters.)
Perhaps, like many of us, Alice Munro has read and fully inhabited a story filled with wonders only to be cheated with the last-line revelation that the guts of that story were nothing but a dream. In contrast, "My Mother's Dream" subverts that expectation and begins with the dream, before
