fuckyeahreading!

slothshark:

Okay, continuing on with long-overdue book-talkin’.

This book was pretty fantastic—-I said right after I started it that it was a lot better than I’d expected.  The cover and title made me think cutesy-neo-Victorian-spooky-ish, but it was much better than that—-not cutesey neo-Victorian spooky in the slightest, but very much grounded in the real world and the real, relatable emotions of its narrator.

Something I’m always looking for when I read is good characterization, so a big issue I often have with supernatural/paranomal/sci-fi fiction is that the setup of the Superwhatsit premise can eclipse the characters, and this book was an excellent example of how not to do that—-there was a lot of weird stuff going on (there were plot elements, in fact, that I could tell would have annoyed me in the hands of a less skilled writer), but the way all of the characters treated their situations, the ways they reacted and thought, made it all work.  The book dealt with some of the horrors of World War II and deftly combined those horrors with some paranormal horror elements, which I was impressed with. 

The book also made excellent use of vintage photographs throughout—-I was always like, excited to flip the page and see one, and even more excited at the end to read Mr. Riggs’ notes and discover that they really were unusual vintage found photos, not (as I’d thought might be the case) photographs just staged and/or photoshopped to look old and weird.

Anyway, I fail at writing reviews, clearly, but I recommend this one highly.  And they’re already making a movie, which I’m sure will be hideous.