Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.
So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.
The genius of acclaimed author A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction; it will mesmerize readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience-and find the way out.

 

This was a cleverly written and fascinating book; however, it completely failed to grip me.

 

I've been reading this between books for over a month now, and every time I tell myself I'll just read a chapter of another book and go back. Sadly, there was never any point in this book where I really cared if I kept reading or not.

 

I did really adore the concept and some of the messages that were conveyed. I think a lot of people who went to my high school would relate to these characters and their coping mechanisms. This sends a powerful message about the stresses that teenagers these days go through.

 

King's writing is quite evocative, and I felt like every chapter in itself could be a prose poem--in fact, I probably would have adored certain chapters had they stood alone.

I'm not quite sure what just happened (I swear, on Tuesdays I will be seeing helicopters from now on) but I'll be thinking about these characters for a while yer.

 

If you can't pay attention to anything like me, then don't read this. I really recommend this to anyone who has a strong attention span and the ability to take their time. King's writing is very strong and I admire what she's done here.

 

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Two friends find a portal to another dimension and use this “in-between place” to avoid the stress of their everyday lives. What they don’t realize is that every time they enter, they alter reality. Pseudo-punk Magnolia and underachieving gamer-geek Rom are two unlikely friends who only hang out during their walks home together after school. When they find the a portal that leads to different worlds, they use the “in-between place” as an escape from their lives in high school, then later, after college. Their visits through the portal bring them teetering along a tight-rope of fantasy and reality, where they don't always believe what is in front of them, not even their feelings for each other. Inspired by the work of Haruki Murakami and films like Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind, Somewhere In Between is metaphysical coming-of-age story about defining love and finding yourself.

 

This was a short read that was more surrealist than I predicted. Though its premise was exciting, it could have used some expansion.

 

I really adored the premise of the book; however, I felt like the blurb explained what happened a whole lot better than the book itself did. While the idea of this in-between place being another dimension is alluded to, it isn't explicitly detailed, and it's not at all apparent that this is the case.

 

The plot is given by the blurb, so I feel that it isn't a spoiler to mention that not only do they not realize that this portal alters reality, but I, the reader, also did not. There were some details that I later, having read the blurb, notice; however, I had attributed these to other explanations. The book was written in sections from the past and from the present, which sometimes became confusing. Tense was often the only clue I had to tell me which I was reading at the beginning of a section, and this ultimately became distracting.

 

There was a lot of potential in this book and in the characters that wasn't quite fulfilled. Magnolia especially had such an interesting personality and I loved Li's descriptions of her. I could see her so vividly, from her hair to her clothes, that I was disappointed to not hear more about her background and how she acted. I never heard an explanation of her family life or why she chose relationships she did and I really wanted to get to know her.

 

I did love the writing of this book and I felt like the locations in particular were immensely well described. I could envision each scene, I only wish that there had been more detail and more build up to really show the plot and to deepen the premise.

 

Though I think this book fell short of its mark, I do highly recommend it and I'd read more by Li. My desire for more stems from the quality of what is presented in this book.

 

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My first reaction, after I finished this: What did I just read?

I like the books I read to make some sort of sense, even if it's only at the end that everything comes together. The Box Man felt like it was composed of pieces that would eventually form some kind of bizarre whole...except then they didn't. Or at least that's how I felt. This is the kind of book that reminds me why I so rarely venture outside of reading genre fiction.

It started off promisingly enough. The Box Man begins by writing, in excruciating detail, how one constructs a box man's box, and what it's like to start living in one. He describes the experiences of the man who shot the box man, why he began writing his notes, and the offer he received for his box, via the nurse's apprentice. It was all very strange stuff – just strange enough to carry me along, not so strange as to push me away. The book was ever-so-slightly unpleasant to read, and yet I couldn't not read it, propelled by a need to know where Abe was going with all of this.

At some point, I realized that I couldn't be sure what was real and what wasn't. A snippet of conversation between the doctor and the nurse's apprentice indicated that at least some of what the Box Man was experiencing was, in fact, in his head. The Box Man maybe realized this as well, leading to a convoluted shift in his conversation with the doctor, in which they discussed the reality of their current situation. Was the Box Man really there, having that conversation with the doctor, or was he in his box, writing about the meeting with the doctor that he would have in the near future as though it were his present? Or was the Box Man the creation of some third person, who was writing about the Box Man writing about his conversation with the doctor and the nurse's apprentice?

Things got even more bizarre from that point on. There may have been a murder, maybe two murders. The nurse's apprentice might have become a captive, willing or unwilling, or maybe that was all just in the Box Man's head. If I had to say what this book ended up being about, the best I could come up with would be: identity, lust, voyeurism, and an intense desire to see but not be seen.

The Box Man, whoever he was, may have started down the road to becoming a box man after a humiliating, yet sexually exciting, experience involving his first attempt at voyeurism when he was a boy. My theory is that most of what happened in the book was the hallucinations of the Box Man as he bled to death after being shot. The doctor, the nurse's apprentice, and all associated characters were figments of the Box Man's imagination, maybe fragments of his own experiences and feelings. That would, I think, explain some of the more bizarre aspects of the doctor's story, as well as the strange impression I got that the nurse's apprentice wasn't actually a human being, but rather just a collection of attractive body parts.

While I found this to be a compelling book, it wasn't an enjoyable one. I really wish the ending had been even just a little less ambiguous – I was left feeling like Abe had taken the easy way out. There are plenty of stories that are strange and unsettling, and yet don't leave the reader adrift at the end. I don't consider The Box Man to be one of those stories.

 

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Surrealist Poetry in English

I found this in a used book shop and since I love French surrealist poetry I thought I’d have a look at an anthology collecting examples of what English speakers have done with it.

I have to say the book starts out pretty choppy with some poets just winging it completely with little positive outcome. If you’ve ever read Benjamin Peret, the Belgian surrealist, the surrealist of all surrealists, you’d see where some of these imitations came from. It doesn’t work. Oddly enough, the book also contains many translations of surrealist poetry into English, and how that qualifies as English surrealism you got me.

Still, things improved as the book went on, though I find it hard to classify a lot of the work in here as strictly surrealist, and who cares. Among the contemporary poets included are W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Patchen and James Tate. Yes, the volume is overwhelmed by men and I guess there are few female surrealists, or even non-surrealists who have written a surrealist poem that anyone has read.

But enough quibbling. I enjoyed this a lot, even some of the crappy parts were so crappy they made me laugh. And there was also some excellent stuff in there, like the short short poems of Bill Knott, and Ken Smith’s poem “Train.” (here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/train-2/)

Death by Bill Knott

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as if I am flying into myself.