Reviews

City in Love by Alex Shakar

msjoanna's review

3.0

Although billed as a retelling of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the stories are all contemporary New York characters. The whole book, and the style of the stories, is experimental. It’s an ambitious project; sometimes it works and the author achieves something wonderful, fresh, and creative. But other times, it just falls flat. When the author hits on a voice and a character, he does an incredible job with the story. In particular, “The Sky Inside,” in which two characters walk through a natural history museum and use the Planetarium projector to see the stars, was a wonderful musing on the problems of a modern city. On the other hand, “City in Love,” the title story, which was coded through a complicated cuing system, seemed overly clever an too much work for the rather uninteresting musing on modern love. Overall, I’d recommend the book, especially to those interested in experimental narrative structures.