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verkisto 's review for:
Strange Angels
by Kathe Koja
As much as I like Koja's style, I have a hard time with her protagonists. I get that she's writing about those who are disaffected and on the fringe, but man, they're hardly ever likable. They're all in bad situations, but most of the time they're there because of their own actions, and, even when they know that about themselves, they don't do anything to get themselves out of those situations. It's hard to sympathize with characters like that.
Strange Angels is less horror than it is an examination of mental illness, and I might have liked it more had I not read Challenger Deep a few weeks before. Both books look at schizophrenia, but it feels like Shusterman has a much better understanding of the illness than Koja does. Between that juxtaposition and the lack of sympathy for the main character, it was hard to get behind this story as much as I have Koja's other works.
One final note: I read this as an ebook, and the number of typos were inexcusable. Lots of commas had been replaced by periods, which is bad enough in any book, but in one where the author writes in an unorthodox, stream-of-consciousness style, it's unforgivable. Pay a damn proofreader to make sure the texts scanned correctly!
Strange Angels is less horror than it is an examination of mental illness, and I might have liked it more had I not read Challenger Deep a few weeks before. Both books look at schizophrenia, but it feels like Shusterman has a much better understanding of the illness than Koja does. Between that juxtaposition and the lack of sympathy for the main character, it was hard to get behind this story as much as I have Koja's other works.
One final note: I read this as an ebook, and the number of typos were inexcusable. Lots of commas had been replaced by periods, which is bad enough in any book, but in one where the author writes in an unorthodox, stream-of-consciousness style, it's unforgivable. Pay a damn proofreader to make sure the texts scanned correctly!