It may be a blessing that these nasty little stories are so confusingly told that the
reader often has no idea what is going on; When you do get a glimmer of meaning, you''ll often wish you hadn''t. This is the
kind of collection that makes you
wonder about the
author -- what kind of person has this kind of perversity floating around in her head?
No doubt this kind of storytelling appeals to some readers, especially older teens who have an appreciation for the dark and twisted themselves. But even they may be frustrated by the writing, which is often so deliberately opaque that the reader may wonder whether the author is hiding something -- or assume she has nothing much to say. Amidst all the run-on sentences and arcane language, it often seems as if Lanagan is trying so hard to sound clever and literary that she has completely lost her train of thought. Take a look at the excerpt below -- if it doesn''t take your kids at least three readings to figure out what she''s talking about, and if they have a taste for the macabre, by all means get this
book.
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