On the boundaries

clips from Tom Atherton's review at Strange Horizons 

It’s brilliantly well-written, shockingly raw, and transportingly—sometimes confusingly (but not in a bad way)—weird.

Glimmerglass shimmers on the boundaries of the real and the unreal, of poetry and prose, of the ordinary and the fantastic. It’s down to the caprice of the individual reader, therefore, to decide exactly what sort of story it’s trying to tell.

It’s difficult to overstate the emotional effect that Glimmerglass has had on me. This is a beautiful, complex, moving book. Marly Youmans’s prose flows like clear water, and every image is, as Cynthia observes, “full of meaning” (p. 39).

Read the complete review here.

the Luck Child, again--

Yesterday I wanted a kiss from the Luck Child, and today I have got it--a gorgeous glory of a review in Strange Horizons from that wonderful reviewer who always sees what no other reviewer sees, Tom Atherton of Wales. It's strong and wide-ranging and full of insight, delineating aspects of the book I like to see revealed. (He's even got a few criticisms, and I can tell you that he's the sort of reviewer whose remarks I will remember, next time I am revising a novel.)

Earlier he wrote an equally insightful review of Thaliad (and he begins this review with Thaliad) that pleased me very much--even, I can say, enlightened me. I am infinitely grateful to him for the results of his story-mining and contemplation.

I have sometimes doubted that beauty and perception can find their reward in our culture of trend and frantic change and celebrity. The fact that Strange Horizons has picked up Tom Atherton as a reviewer is heartening.

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In more Luck Child news, most or all of my marked galley pages turned out to be not lost forever but scattered about "in the mail bin."

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Images in this post: Art for Glimmerglass (Mercer, 2014) by Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales, book design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt of Georgia. Art for Thaliad (Phoenicia, 2012) by Clive as well, with design by Andrew Wakelin, also of Wales. May I just confess that I love Wales?