There’s something compelling about a Jasper Fforde novel, something that sucks you into the story, tossing you alg until the end when it finally grinds you up and spits you out before you even know what’s happened. Fforde is a true satirist, not just pulling apart the way we tell stories, but pulling apart accepted critical conventions and putting them back together again, reinterpreting criticism and analysis from the inside out.

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Thoughtful, dreamlike, meandering–these were my expectations of Ali Shaw’s debut novel, The Girl with Glass Feet. For the first chapter or so, the novel held up. Lines like “It was a darkening afternoon whose final shafts of light passed between trees, swung across the earth like searchlights,” drew me into St. Hauda’s Land, setting up yet more expectations. Then it all fell flat…

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If I were pitching Pam Bachorz’ Candor at an editorial meeting, I’d call it “dystopian contemporary YA meets The Stepford Wives with a dash of Wisteria Lane from a male perspective”.

Oscar Banks is cookie-cutter perfect. He’s a straight A student, is dating the prettiest, smartest girl in Candor High, and has more friends than a parrot at a pirate convention…[more]

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Published April 30, 2000, SFWP.org

He thinks I am my mother. I hear it in his voice. I feel it in the way he fingers my hair. Her hair.

I know I look like her. We have the same blue eyes, the same thick flaxen hair. It was comforting, after she died. Looking in the mirror was almost like looking at her.

Now, I hate it. I hate the way his eyes follow me, undress me. I hate the quaver in his councilors voices, insistent, but not insistent enough…[more]