Note: I received this ebook from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. The beginning: That’s the first line of Boy Snow Bird, and doesn’t it remind you of how much you’ve missed Helen Oyeyemi? In her newest book, a girl named Boy runs away from her abusive father, a rat-catcher, to a small town called Flax Hill. There she meets a man called Arturo Whitman, and maybe she falls in love with him, and she…
17 CommentsTag: a very tiny tiny bit of magical realism
And magical realism rears its ugly — no, I’m kidding. The Oracle of Stamboul has the tiniest ever amount of magical realism, actually the perfect amount. At the start of the story, when our protagonist Eleonora is about to be born, the author mentions a flock of hoopoes (they look like this, if you’re curious) that comes to settle near her house on the night of her birth. After that, I was on red alert, as my displeasure with an excess of magical realism is rapid and permanent. But first-time author Michael David Lukas has a light touch with the…
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