Portable Magic
Reading, for me, is entertainment and an escape from the real world. But it can also inform and stretch the boundaries of the life I live.
Currently reading
Imaginary Friend ★★★★☆
Imaginary Friend is a hard book to review. I struggled even with deciding on how many stars to rate it. It's kind of a mess, in terms of pacing, plotting, and themes. Most of the characters are just archetypes. But the story and the imagery was so compelling I could not put it down or stay away for long. I kept coming back for more. I've been reading so much horror for so long that I'm not often moved or chilled, but there were many small moments in this book that felt somehow fresh and new and awful.
It really needed a heavier hand with the editing, though. Remember the complaints about the LotR movie The Return of the King had about 10 different endings - every time you thought the story resolved, it picked up and told a new ending? That's this book. At one point last night, I was yelling at the book in my best Monty Python voice, "Get on with it!" There was a lot of weird Christian allegory, but I'm not enough of a church-goer to parse it.
And yet. And yet, I still would recommend it.
Hardcover version, picked up on a whim at Half Price Books, when I set a goal for myself to pick a hardcover of an author I'm unfamiliar with from the Horror section, without reading reviews or anything other than the jacket blurb.
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