reassuringly weird
Apr. 20th, 2008 02:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maribouEverywhere, by Bruce Brooks
So I've yet to read a Bruce Brooks novel I didn't really enjoy, though Midnight Hour Encores is my perpetual sentimental favorite and Asylum for Nightface is one of the most startlingly, solidly good YA novels I've read ... but the back of this one, and the cover picture, made me worry that this one wouldn't have that really tasty strangeness that all his other books have. The strangeness that doesn't necessarily have to do with anything that *happens*, but with the basic alienation between a kid-perspective and an adult one, the honesty and oddity of how your average smart and perceptive kid sees the world around him or her. His ability to capture that perspective is what makes Brooks a superior writer and not just a good one, no matter his subject - but this is an early book, and the blurb copy was vague and unimpressive, and it was written for a younger age group than most of his things, and um, yeah, I needn't have worried.
(67/300)
So I've yet to read a Bruce Brooks novel I didn't really enjoy, though Midnight Hour Encores is my perpetual sentimental favorite and Asylum for Nightface is one of the most startlingly, solidly good YA novels I've read ... but the back of this one, and the cover picture, made me worry that this one wouldn't have that really tasty strangeness that all his other books have. The strangeness that doesn't necessarily have to do with anything that *happens*, but with the basic alienation between a kid-perspective and an adult one, the honesty and oddity of how your average smart and perceptive kid sees the world around him or her. His ability to capture that perspective is what makes Brooks a superior writer and not just a good one, no matter his subject - but this is an early book, and the blurb copy was vague and unimpressive, and it was written for a younger age group than most of his things, and um, yeah, I needn't have worried.
(67/300)
