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Lädt ... Mr Splitfootvon Samantha Hunt
  
Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.   ) bookonion | Mar 9, 2024 |   ) Bebe_Ryalls | Oct 20, 2023 |  ) Lauranthalas | Jul 24, 2023 |  ) jarrettbrown | Jul 4, 2023 | The very next day, Bookriot, sent an email stating the ebook copy was only $2.99 at Amazon (as of the writing of this, it still is). I thought it was an omen, so I picked it up. The premise sounded great! Two orphan children meet with a professional con man and one of the children talks to the dead. Sounds like a no brainer! This had to be read. The funny thing is that I could understand if someone decided not to finish this book after starting it. That seems an odd thing to write in a review that will be positive. The beginning of this book, while Ruth and Nat are in the orphanage is so bizarre that it could potentially turn people off. I write that because that is almost what happened to me. This is a quirky tale, but I am glad I stuck with it because once one falls into the writer's groove, it is such a fun book. As written earlier, it is the story of Ruth, who has a scarred face, and Nat, who declare themselves sisters after Ruth's older sister El ages out of the orphanage. Ruth and Nat are inseparable and have a bond that can never be broken. Nat can talk to the dead, a skill he hones, when the two meet up with Mr Bell, a con man who helps them earn money using Nat's skill. This is also a road trip story of Ruth and Cora, Ruth's pregnant niece, and takes place in the future in Ruth's timeline. Ruth cannot speak and comes to Cora in the middle of the night insisting that Cora must follow her. Cora has no idea where they are going and is also anxious because they are going to walk the whole trip. The two narratives trade off alternatively chapter by chapter. The wonderful thing is the further into the book one goes, the closer the two narratives become. Hunt has a wonderful way of storytelling in that sense. This is a book about relationships ultimately and what one would do for love. From Nat's ability and the desire for his rubes to believe what he is doing simply to be reassured their deceased is ok to the complex relationship of Ruth and Nat to sex without love attached in Cora's pregnancy. How far will one go for love? As stated earlier, this will not be a book for everybody as it is very strange and simply weird, but by the end of the book it is worth the journey and the questions that accompany it. There are moments of danger in both tales, huge questions in both, and one is thrown off on purpose. The book itself is a con of sorts in that sense. One has to question what is real and what isn't. What is truth and what is a lie? If you can stick with it, the book keeps getting better. All in all, I rated it 3.5 stars simply because it took a bit to get into. ( ) Nerdyrev1 | Nov 23, 2022 |
 *** 3 out 5 Stars Review by: Mark Palm Twisted Ghosts... I was a teenager when I first “discovered” South American Magic Realism. Now Magic Realism has been with us for a long, long time, from Laurence Sterne to Franz Kafka, but the South Americans were trending, and I read Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar, etc, but The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa was the one that warped my mind the most. It was so trippy that I had to resort to a notebook to keep it all straight, and even then most of the time I was reading it I felt like I had a serious fever. All of which brings me to Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt, which is probably the most hallucinatory book I have read since then. It’s a shame that I read this as an arc, because I can’t quote from it, and Ms. Hunt is a superb line-by-line writer, and her prose absolutely sings. Like The Green House however, I can’t quite grasp exactly what happened. Ruth grows up in the Love of Christ! foster home run by an abusive religious fanatic who mistreats his charges. After her older sister Eleanor ages out of foster care Ruth teams up with a boy named Nat, who can channel the dead. As teens the two meet Mr. Bell, who is a con artist. Ruth marries him, but they are stalked by Zeke, a dangerous psycho who wants Ruth for himself. This narrative is entwined with one fourteen years later, with Ruth’s niece, Cora, who is pregnant and unmarried and generally bored with her life. Ruth shows up, and silently convinces Cora to follow her. The two spend the next several months walking around New York state, even as Cora’s pregnancy makes it harder and more dangerous for her. Of course Cora has a Destiny, but by the time it came around I was pretty perplexed. There are cults and religious fanatics and raving lunatics, and I was just waiting for someone that felt like they were from this planet. Now as I said, Ms. Hunt is a wonderful writer of prose, but the biggest problem I had with this book was the characters. Almost everyone felt like they had dropped in from another plane of existence, and while there is nothing wrong with weirdness, I felt that the weirdness was sometimes forced. It didn’t help that almost no one was sympathetic either. I feel that this was purposeful, and I don’t believe that characters need to be likeable; but the level of inexplicability was a bit to high for me. The dream-like quality of the storylines was effective, and there was a palpable sense of ghostly menace that provided a great deal of suspense, and there was never a page that was boring or dull, but I felt that a few moments of normalcy may have better served to illustrate the strange and sometimes miraculous elements of this book. One thing is for sure; Ms Hunt doesn't play it safe. While she didn’t quite nail it Mr. Splitfoot is certainly a powerful book, by a writer who seems to be just bursting with talent. Full reviews available at: http://www.thebookendfamily.weebly.co... Auszeichnungen
"A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning. Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who -- or what -- has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road? In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa. Making good on the extraordinary acclaim for her previous books, Samantha Hunt continues to be "dazzling" (Vanity Fair) and to deliver fiction that is "daring and delicious" (Chicago Tribune)"-- Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.68)
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