A review by vspinazola
Inland by Téa Obreht

5.0

Damn near perfect novel. Incredible imagining of the stories behind the ghost camels of the West. Some favorite passages -

The longer I live, Burke, the more I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions.

Because man is only man. And God, in His infinite wisdom, made it so that to live, is to wound another. And He made every man blind to his own weapons, and too short-living to do anything but guard jealously his own small, wasted way. And thus we go on.

You have stood on bluffs planted up with scorched saplings where the ground was pocked with exhalations, with ruts belching white gobs of mud as if the earth were breathing. You have walked the rim of a jaundiced gulch, veined high and low with bands of ore, through which the whitecaps of a nameless river went roaring.

Unsettling, how a person could be so easily recognized at a distance, not by feature or coloring, but by the composite gestures particular to himself alone.

She would never move herself again, of course. They would watch for it in the coming years, but it never happened, and thinking of it afterward Nora would come to wonder why substantiation always seemed to kill the things that had survived so long on faith alone.

Brilliant!!