This is a pretty good and interesting novel, maybe novella--the book's like just over 200 pages, and typeset with a lot of whites space. It's not really in any genre that I can identify, in a more reasonable time it'd probably be something like mainstream, but I guess it's probably literary, or at least it has aspirations in that direction; these days "mainstream fiction" is ... barely a thing, or maybe the mainstream these days is Romance (the genre, which is the engine that powers publishing). Anyway, this is pretty gritty small-town fiction with a late teenager staring mostly unblinkingly at rapidly approaching adulthood; a moment of smartassery leads vaguely to his being suspended from school for a week, and he uses that week to figure some things out about himself and his place in the world. His future looks ... pretty OK, if not exactly bright, though I wouldn't say the story exactly has a happy ending. Lots of nice turns of phrase, the POV/narrator seems pretty spot-on.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Ohio by Stephen Markley
This is not a happy novel. I mean, you probably wouldn't expect a novel set in dying-small-town Ohio to be happy, but this novel convey...

-
Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with no...
-
This is a surprisingly good thrillerish crime novel--there are elements of twisty whodunit mystery at play, and interesting layers of inno...
-
A grim novel about crime and corruption, and the past catching up to the present, with more than a little in the subtext about it infiltra...
No comments:
Post a Comment