p. 14: Black fly season at Eye Lake: “A bush plane went buzzing over us and it seemed funny to me how even the human stuff around here was beginning to be like bugs.” ~ Tristan Hughes. p. 16
Lovely dexterity of observation and language, yet with a sustained flow that doesn’t chop itself to bits like a book of poems that rolls ideas into discrete paper beads…well, before I came along and hacked out a bead at least. We’re far from thru but if more novels were like this, with craft going pages after page under a likeable narrator, I would read more novels.
She was using that voice that’s really two voices at once, one soothing and friendly for the kid, the other hissed and pissed for you, as if your ears are meant to pick up an extra frequency when you’re older that kids can’t hear, like a bat.
Bobby and I stood there confused. He wanted to lure a lot and I wanted him to have it.
Ah, that awkward scene. Yet so well told. There’s something appealing about a story where the internal monologue and what people say mismatch, the narrator understanding more than he lets on and different things than people around him assume he understands. The writer steps back and lets us cross the gap of differences.