Glimmerglass giveaway and January review clips

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Design by Burt & Burt

Clips from 3 January reviews 

One thing that I find interesting about this batch of reviews is that they suggest that the book is a "new genre," "something new," and a mixture of many things.

   1.  At Curled Up with a Good Book

Listed as a novel, I found Glimmerglass to be enchanted and quirky. It feels more like a fantasy or gothic mystery than a prosaic "novel," a fairly new genre that is indefinable....This is an amazing book and engaging tale. I sat with the finished book in my lap and wondered where this remarkable author found her muse and created such a oddly lovely place, peopled with the strange, laced with the usual human emotions--jealousy, fear, love and curiosity. I fully intend to read this again, and to explore some of Youmans' other writing. --Laura Strathman Hulka

  2. Novelist Scott G. F. Bailey at his blog, 
        Six Words for a Hat

I am currently reading Marly Youmans' 2014 novel Glimmerglass, a hard shining tale of art and wonder, about how life is art and wonder, how art and wonder are life, how wonder and life are art. I am trying to think of what it reminds me of, and the best I can do right now is sort of mid-period A.S. Byatt crossed with H.D. Thoreau under the tutelage of Lewis Carroll. The prose is vibrant and imaginative, the images of nature rubbing against and through fantastic and magical symbols... Youmans has written a magic book, is what I keep thinking as I read. Not a book about magic, but a book full of magic, made of magic. A lot of modern literature is about the existential problem and focuses with a serious mind on the pain of existence; Youmans focuses with a serious mind on the joy of existence, without sentiment and treacle....Youmans' literary conceit of presenting her characters as mythic figures while simultaneously presenting them as mudbound humans; the story threatens, as I've said, to tumble backwards through the landscape into myth; it's unstable and hallucinatory, but not in a C.S. Lewis "there is a hidden world accessible through my closet" kind of way. Youmans is doing something new: her world is both mundane and miraculous. --Scott G. F. Bailey

Signed hardcover-and-card giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Glimmerglass

by Marly Youmans

Giveaway ends February 11, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

And . . .  from the other side of the continent,
      3.  At The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Blogcritics

Part fairy tale, part cautionary tale with a dash of fantasy and allegory, Youmans has created a special world in Glimmerglass. Cooper Patent is a village rooted in the States, but it shimmers with hints of Neverland, the Land of Oz and a visit through the looking glass. The setting has an eerie beauty to it along with tingling suspense and a real-world mystery clamoring for resolution. The language is spare and illuminating and sparkles a bit at the edges. I finished it late last night "before threading the eye of the needle and sliding head first into the plush midnight fabric of sleep." --Suzanne Brazil