I mentioned in my previous review that I have spent the last month of year reading three novels by Jonathan Carroll. Glass Soup is the second of the Carroll novels and I will be posting a review on The Wooden Sea by the end of the year. These Carroll novels have given me a new perspective towards the fantasy genre and how far the boundaries can be extended outside of the Tolkien/Lewis/Jordan/Sanderson type of traditional fantasy.

 

Glass Soup is the sequel to White Apples and continues the story of the philanderer, Vincent Ettrich and his true love, Isabelle Neukor.  Both of them have crossed over from life to death and back to life again. Isabelle is carrying their special child, who can restore the balance between life and death. However, the agents of chaos are determined to keep Isabelle and the child in a place where that result can not happen.

 

Carroll gives a philosophical and surreal perspective on love, life, death, and the afterlife that kept this reader interested throughout the novel. I will admit I thought the plot in White Apples was better executed than in Glass Soup. However, I still felt that Glass Soup was rewarding to read and a novel that deserves my recommendation.  You can read Glass Soup as a standalone novel, but I would suggest that you read White Apples to get the full perspective of this duology.

Neil Gaiman said about him: "Carroll opens a window that did not know and invites you to look through. Gives you eyes to see them, and brings together the world with all its freshness, honesty and innovation. " And this is precisely what we found in Glass Soup, a story that combines the usual surprising, it makes sense with the fantastic, the impossible everyday.

Carroll writes in a style that at first seems simple and easy. Therefore, you read his books in one sitting, and before you know how it happened, you have forgotten the surrounding, and you are completely hooked. I think he is able to awake people who has lost his keen on literature.

Jonathan Carroll has a great capacity to make everyday transformed in something fantastic, or wonderful (in the style of Alice, from Lewis Carroll), and this amazes and fascinates me. His ideas about life and death are interesting and manage to make me think, ask questions that maybe otherwise would not even on my head.

In crystals soup we enter the world of Simon, and soon, very soon, we realize that we are in a different world, unreal and confusing. It is the world of death, where time and logic that we apply in life have no place. It is a death built from dreams (and nightmares) of Simon. This is a story that will navigate between two worlds of life and death, a dream story that will make us conceive our own paradise or hell.

Although I checked the description of this book (on the flaps), I didn't know it was a sequel to White Apples. I enjoyed it, but not it's the best novel by this author that I have read.