A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Eimear McBride)

This is the story of a troubled girl growing up in a disturbed family, overshadowed by her brother's childhood brain surgery and her single mother's religious fixations. I admired the author's unique language, using broken sentence fragments and neologisms to convey the broken, emotionally forceful story she wanted to tell, but it didn't work for me. I was constantly focusing on the words and had difficulty pushing through them to the story itself. This probably reflects a failure on my part to appreciate the poetic rhythm of the language and how it could pull you in, stuck in my own literal thinking. but there it is. I can recommend it to anyone who is more open than I am to the abstract impressionism the author is going for here.

Darkfever (Karen Marie Moning)

This is the first book of a fantasy series by the author of the Highlander books, which is very popular though I haven't read it. I was looking for contemporary fantasy to read so I thought I'd try this. I have to say, I had problems with it. Most of the problems could have been fixed with a bit of editing. The author used inappropriate words in phrases like "the bed perched under the window" (beds don't perch). Phrases were padded with vague adjectives or unneeded words, as when she said the driveway was "framed by huge, ancient trees on both sides" (could it have been framed on one side?). I had to laugh at a tense moment when the narrator said that she had been sprinting to keep up with a monster, but now she would have to break into a run to catch it. Some basic facts were just wrong, as when it was 7 pm in Dublin at midsummer and she called it sunset (in Dublin at midsummer the sun sets three hours later). More serious than these problems, which could have been easily fixed with a sharp blue pencil, was the general attitude of the protagonist. Nearly a third of the way through the book, having had up-close interactions with fantastic monsters, she was still pretending that there was nothing supernatural going on. I wanted to slap her. There is a good story under here, and I won't say don't read it, but it's not for me.