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katseye116 's review for:
The Cage
by Audrey Schulman
Wow! What a ride! This book looked like a good read but I never expected it to be so riveting, so well-written, so realistic. The story is about a photographer who sets out on an assignment in the inhospitable and dangerous environment of the Arctic north. Her experiences there are life-changing. Schulman's writing sucked me in, put me into the skin of Beryl, the main character. The whole book is excellent. I felt the cold. I felt the coarseness of the hair of the polar bears. The verisimilitude of the descriptions is startling and vivid. The suspense about killed me. I loved all of that, which is a tribute I rarely bestow on any book. This is as fine as writing gets when it comes to putting the reader into the story. I only have a couple of criticisms, one minor, one major. The minor one is that the writer sometimes gets too obscure in her descriptions of Beryl' thought processes, taking me out of the story while I try to figure out what it mean. The major flaw is that on a few occasions Beryl does something so incredibly stupid that I had to stop reading. I won't say more because I don't want to spoil the read for others, but when you get to those parts, you'll understand. Despite these things, this book is not to be missed. It literally changed my opinion of certain things, which is a rare feat. I found myself thinking about the story most of the time when I wasn't reading it. Not just wanting to get back to it, but thinking about events in the story, which felt so real to me, as if I had lived them myself. I can't think of higher praise for a writer than that.