Vanessa Veselka

Capsule review from first read, 25 Jan 2012, edited to add link to Kris's review:

A fantastic debut that makes me less worried about the future of fiction. This is a book like no other, and Veselka's prose is raw, poetic, gritty, and tapped in to social anxieties and political unrest in almost prophetic ways.

Kris's review is well worth reading, so I will direct you there.… (mehr)

This novel is set in a police state, presumably the United States, fraught with terrorists and attendant harsh anti-terrorist measures. It begins as a sardonic yet somehow affectionate romp through the contemporary counterculture of wokesters and hipsters as seen through the eyes of a disaffected employee of a vegan restaurant. About halfway through the book, the emphasis shifts to a group of monkeywrenchers (or terrorists, if you will) as they lay plans to strike a major blow against society. I enjoyed the first part of the book more; though the plot thickens and twists nicely into thriller territory, the author also introduces a myriad of new characters who aren't very well developed and whom I found difficult to differentiate. The already substantial vocabulary load from the restaurant of the weird glop the rising generation likes to eat and drink is augmented by an order of magnitude by geological and explosives arcana. And I hope she knows more about geology and explosives than she does about astronomy; she has her protagonists blissing out at the sublimity of the constellation Capricornus--I hope they had a really good telescope, assuming that they're in the Northern Hemisphere--and looking upward at two o'clock in the morning and seeing a 'thin moon', an impossibility. The author is a considerable wordsmith; almost every page has a striking insight or turn of phrase, but Edward Abbey did the second half of this book much better two generations ago.… (mehr)

This novel is the epic story of a very, very complex family. We learn initially that baby girls are born to two mothers on the same day. One of the mothers will raise not only her own baby but the other woman's as well. Fast forward, they are adults and are very different young ladies who are curious about the other birth mother as the woman who raised them has kept it secret which girl matched with this mother. So based on this premise there are many twists and turns in this totally captivating novel… (mehr)