THE GIRL WITH GLASS FEET
By Ali Shaw (Henry Holt and Co., 287 pages, $24)
British writer Ali Shaw's fantastical debut novel, though entirely original, is reminiscent of other strange stories -- of Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter, of the weird characters in "Pirates of the Caribbean" and Tim Burton movies, of Germany's Brothers Grimm and South America's magical realists. It's an oddball love story set in the isolated, cold, moldy, foliage-choked, bug-rich, fictional archipelago of St. Hauda's Land, where a young woman named Ida is horrified to find her toes, then her feet, turning to glass, a transformation that's clearly spreading north.
With the help of her unlikely new lover, Midas, an eccentric photographer, she sets out to solve the mystery. The two confront family secrets and a menagerie of St. Hauda's horrors, including a glass body buried in a peat bog, a disturbed grave that holds the decomposed body of a cold-hearted man with -- surprise -- a glass heart, gorgeous and deadly jellyfish, moth-sized flying cattle and other things so fantastical they give the book a dreamlike, sometime nightmarish, feel.
Whether you read it as science fiction, fairy tale, fable, allegory, mystery or magical realism, "The Girl With Glass Feet" is weirdly beautiful and highly entertaining.
PAMELA MILLER,
NIGHT METRO EDITOR
SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT
By Beth Hoffman (Pamela Dorman Books, 320 pages, $25.95)
Surely few 12-year-olds have needed saving as badly as CeeCee Honeycutt. Her life is one horror after another as she tries to care for her psychotic mother in small-town Ohio. Help arrives in the form of Great Aunt Tootie, a true Southern belle, who showers CeeCee with affection and takes her to live in Georgia with her and housekeeper Oletta. There, CeeCee is surrounded by a passel of wonderful women, including Thelma Goodpepper, who enlists her in adventures such as helping to fling giant slugs into the yard of the nutty Violene Hobbs as revenge for cutting down a magnolia tree.
Once CeeCee is comfortable and adjusted to the move, she must begin the hard job of grieving the mother she never had. This is the meat of the book, and it offers a refreshing dose of hope. There are gems of wisdom sprinkled throughout: "Everyone needs to find the one thing that brings out her passion. It's what we do and share with the world that matters," wise Tootie tells CeeCee.
"That's what friends should do: cherish the good and pretend not to notice the harmless rest," CeeCee figures out one day while observing longtime friends at a nursing home. And this, from Tootie, one of the most accurate description of grief I have encountered: "Grief comes in all sorts of ways. There's the kind of grief that rips your world in half. And then there's another kind of grief that doesn't feel like grief at all. It's like a tiny splinter you don't even know you have until if festers so deep it has nowhere left to go but into your soul." From the beautiful cover illustration of a hummingbird through to the very satisfying ending, this book will chase your winter blahs.
JUDY ROMANOWICH SMITH
NEWS DESIGNER
