Don't Miss

• NYRB Classics: Save 30%
• Paperback Favorites
  for Book Groups
• Springer Math Sale!
• Subscribe to Indiespensable

More at Powell's

• Featured Signed Editions
• Rare and Collectible Books
• eBooks | Audio | DVDs | Blu-ray

A Few Initial and Not-Comprehensive Meditations on Group Novels

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!

Average customer rating based on 1 comment:

mrmerz, February 9, 2007 (view all comments by mrmerz)
I'm rating this top-drawer for the series of three Eva Wiley stories. It would be a pity to read them other than as a single work. In the first book we meet Eva and learn a bit about her life and her obsessions. In the second, we realize we are confronting a primal force of nature, not at all related to the normal character we encounter on the protagonsist side of a mystery/crime book. In the third we accept that her literary precursors are White Fang and Tarzan before he met Jane, and that this verges on the saddest story ever told, but leaves us that last bit of hope. Hope for what, I don't know because Eva herself promises only more of the same.

Eva lives in slum London. She sleeps by day, guards a junkyard by night, and lives in her dreams and a few times a month in reality in the wrestling ring. She is big, strong and ugly by her description. You do not want to meet her in a dark alley. On a narrow stairway she will make you back down to let her pass because she doesn't know any other way to do it.

She loves the older sister of her memory. She clings for life to the idea of family, so she will space out and find herself on her way to her mother, a prostitute who wants to disown her age, experience, motherhood and history.

Liza Cody builds through her series, ending with this book in 1997, in an incredibly craftswork manner. A reader can practically see the writer's mind working as Liza works out how to construct a complicated mystery plot as reflected but not really seen by the character in the center of the narrative. In Musclebound we have pretty typical mystery story plots whizzing past, but glimpsed so fleetingly by our narrator that they are barely recognizable.

Read Musclebound third of the three Eva Wiley books, although each is written to stand as its own novel. But this series is very well worth the read.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(0 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)

report this comment

Product Details

ISBN:

9780892966011

Author:

Cody, Liza

Publisher:

Mysterious Press

Location:

New York, NY :

Subject:

London

Subject:

Detective and mystery stories

Subject:

London (England) Fiction.

Subject:

Women wrestlers

Series Volume:

no. 5J95-01

Publication Date:

c1997

Binding:

HARDCOVER

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

279 p.