Read the INK Q&A with Howard Blum and save 30% on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century.
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Read the INK Q&A with Howard Blum and save 30% on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century.
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Janet Elsbach has commented on (1) product.
The Uses of Enchantment: A Novel by Heidi Julavits
Janet Elsbach, February 7, 2007
There's some great writing here but the book is so carefully (over-)constructed that it gets lost. The plot is so twisty and the perspectives so shifty that even though I was supposed to be rolling along, post-modernly digging the meta-narrative about the subjectivity of truth and so forth, I was often just lost, flipping back and forth pointlessly among the pages trying to decode simple plot elements. There are some great characterizations, but overall the characters are so bloodlessly and irredeemably unhappy that I was hungover at the end, missing the breathtaking resolution I'd been wooed with and glad to be out of this grey, murky world of meanness.(4 of 10 readers found this comment helpful)