I just felt like this book was trying so hard to come across as Literary and Important, and this forced ‘lyrical’ writing style came at the expense of… literally everything else. Imagine looking at a painting with your nose pressed up against the canvas. I felt like I was being forcibly dragged by the author from one sentence to the next. This may seem like a weird detail to get hung up on, but to me, this book’s most egregious offense was the author’s decision to write it in the present tense, especially given that she didn’t show much aptitude for it. Which didn’t end up panning out, because I hated it too much.)īasically, this book follows two characters, Muriel and Julius – Muriel is a young newlywed who’s recently moved from Kansas to San Diego with her husband, and Julius is her gay brother-in-law – and I’m not going to say any more than that, because apparently this is one of those cases where the dust jacket gives away the entire plot. (And I would have actually DNF’d this – I know, I never DNF books, but I swear to god I would have made an exception, if I hadn’t been assigned to review this for a publication. But this unfortunately ended up being a slog, to the point where I forced myself to read the last 200 pages in one sitting because I never wanted to pick this up once I put it down. On Swift Horses is a book that seemed like it was going to be tailor-made for me queer historical fiction and horses are two things I’m always drawn to.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |