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shimmer's review
5.0
I was asked to provide a blurb for this book, and I was honored to do so because it is awesome. Here's what I said:
"Iredell’s novel is a reconstruction of frontier history in a style that is concrete and mythic at once and keeps the reader asking what is a ‘symbol’ and what is ‘real’ until such questions lose any meaning as the novel carves a clean space for itself. Details of California’s development are both recognizable and hallucinatory, challenging the reader to interrogate every surface, taking nothing on face value. This is exactly the kind of innovative wilderness novel I’ve been waiting for (and grumbling about not being able to find, and wishing I might someday write…), one that doesn’t reduce the outdoors to a backdrop for reassuring human stories, but instead folds together geology and biology and history and a deep sense of time, bringing an experimental approach to a kind of story too often written in a stale binary of man v. nature."
[[UPDATE: I read this as a manuscript as it was moving toward publication, but since then it was cancelled by the publisher.]]
"Iredell’s novel is a reconstruction of frontier history in a style that is concrete and mythic at once and keeps the reader asking what is a ‘symbol’ and what is ‘real’ until such questions lose any meaning as the novel carves a clean space for itself. Details of California’s development are both recognizable and hallucinatory, challenging the reader to interrogate every surface, taking nothing on face value. This is exactly the kind of innovative wilderness novel I’ve been waiting for (and grumbling about not being able to find, and wishing I might someday write…), one that doesn’t reduce the outdoors to a backdrop for reassuring human stories, but instead folds together geology and biology and history and a deep sense of time, bringing an experimental approach to a kind of story too often written in a stale binary of man v. nature."
[[UPDATE: I read this as a manuscript as it was moving toward publication, but since then it was cancelled by the publisher.]]
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