Books on Monday: The Thin Place
Regular readers know that I have no use for unfavorable reviews. What happens, though, when you read a book that, for one reason or another – or for a dozen – doesn’t appeal to you, even though you can not only understand but respect its popularity? My move is to give myself the bad review, to highlight the shortcomings in my imaginative world, or the thousand prejudices that remain in the field even when I’m sure that I’ve just mowed them all down. Then I look for the good things in the book – the things that I wish that the author had made more of, but without complaining that he or she didn’t. As it happens, I suspect that I’d have liked The Thin Place better if I’d read it in one quiet sitting, on a beach, say, interrupted only by meals. The parts of it that put me off certainly didn’t blind me to the fact that it’s an extremely well-made novel. I expect that I’ll recommend it to many friends, without pretending that I was crazy about it. In any case, you can judge the result for yourself, at Portico.
¶ The Thin Place.
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