AUTHOR: A.S. King
PUBLISHED: October 14th, 2014
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Magical Realism
PREMISE: A girl starts to get visions of people's past and future.
MY REVIEW: I'll be honest, as a rule, I don't get into magical realism all that much. It's just a very frustrating genre for me. I don't know if it's just that I've read poor examples of the genre (Time Traveler's Wife) or if the genre is just not for me. I do know WHY it frustrates me. They all have these great set-ups and then there's literally no explanation for the set up, all the focus is on boring melodrama. Seriously, you have a guy who time travels through his past/future and you're focusing not on why, but on his dull predictable romance?
Some of that persists here. It is never explained WHY Glory and her friend get these visions. They just do because of the bat stuff they drank. However, at least in this, the characters are interesting enough to make up for the fact that I wanted the story to focus more on the fascinating dystopian that King described. Seriously, she described it beautifully and honestly, it was more thought out then half of the actual dystopian books that I've read. What got me through this book was the interesting future she painted, and the beautiful writing. I LOVE King's prose. I am definitely reading some of her other books in the future.
While the ending is a tad abrupt for my taste, I overall really liked this book. The set up was unique (even if it was never explained) and it was beautifully written.
WHO SHOULD READ: A.S. King fans, magical realism fans
MY RATING: Four out of Five dead bats
I really loved this story, even with the somewhat odd premise. I totally agree about the writing - so beautiful!
ReplyDeleteKate @ Ex Libris