From a Farther Room

LeGuin's science fiction isn't the ray gun and spaceship kind; it's speculative but grounded in things we know and the ways we know them, scientific in the truest sense. And as such it is wonderfully strange, disorienting, and enlightening all at once. My sister-in-law asked the other day for some post-Potter recommendations; my niece plowed through the last Harry Potter tome in two days, and hasn't found a replacement yet for the Potter books. I wasn't able to get into the first Harry book--I just didn't care for the writing--but I was able to rattle off a short list of my favorite fantasy series from my pre-teen reading. This is a collection that's neither fact nor fiction, fish nor fowl, but a wonderful chimera that can swim and fly in either realm. The camera captures the beauty and decay of the cemetery, the weather-worn statues and tombs, the words that are slowly disappearing for even "etched in stone" doesn't mean forever. What does last forever is the need for, the longing for, beauty and memory. The characters in these stories tend to keep their own counsel; even their internal monologues leave much unsaid. What is most striking in these stories is their humaneness: while Williams' characters are certainly as flawed as anyone else's, as given to silliness or meanness as the average human being, Williams treats them all with love and compassion. Kitty Burns Florey's "Philip and Me and the Closet" is a tightly-constructed, beautifully-written essay that reflects on the power of memory and the dangers hidden in closets. Mark Slouka’s Lost Lake feels more like an extended prose poem than a collection of stories. It’s an elegiac, often melancholy, and quietly moral set of interconnected vignettes, heavy on setting and character but light on plot; reading it evokes the sensation of lying in a boat gently floating in the middle of the eponymous upstate New York lake during the last week of summer, with the mind wandering over the passing season’s events: it’s timeless and subtle, and works its way into the reader’s memory one careful word at a time. There’s enough packed into this little story for a much longer venture, enough rich backstory and characterization and that parallel fairyland to fill many more pages. When is a restaurant review more than a restaurant review? When it's about Dana C., coolest kid at P.S. 94. Sixth grade has started out rough for Amalee. Anne-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies follows the arc of classical comedy, though there's very little funny about this novel. What a start! Ali Smith’s Hotel World explodes with the buzz of language and never relents. Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody? Million-Writers-Award-Worthy: Her Babies Some Stories I've Liked volume 1: Freeze by Becky Hagenston Million-Writers-Award-Worthy: Thief Million-Writers-Award-Worthy: A Happy Dream Million-Writers-Award-Worthy: The Tyranny of the Middle-Aged Short Story Writers The Pledge: A Review Magic for Beginners: A Review