Books With a Difference #2: Islands

Okay, so here are another couple of books I've read that I think worth mentioning.

The first is The Girl with Glass Feet, by Ali Shaw (winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize)

This has to be one of my favourite books.  Possibly not to everyone's taste, it is a unique blend of magic realism, love story, and painful human relationships which evolve, and then dissolve. 

It is beautifully, exquisitely written.  I first listened to it on audio and the narrator  truly did it justice, because I went straight out to buy a written copy, something I do only if I intend to re-read the book or lend it to others. 

The plot may seem a little ridiculous to some. 'Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago  of St. Hauda’s Land. Magical winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts who has only visited the islands once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.'

But thanks to the quality of the writing, the detailed description of the land and its unique ecology, the poetic atmosphere and sheer originality, I found the story beguiling.  There are glass people buried in a bog, and tiny flying cattle, and the main characters are all tortured in their own particular ways, each of them undergoing a kind of psychological (or literal) transformation.  As I said, it is probably not for everybody, but for me it is a masterpiece.

The second is this: The Vanishing Act by Mette Jakobsen. 

The power of this story is in its understatement, and in its vivid imagery.
      

Minou lives on a small island that can be walked around in under an hour.  Her mother vanished a year ago, and Minou doesn't believe she is dead.  Minou lives with her father, who has devoted his life to philosophy, but she also has her mother's imagination and love of the arts, and she struggles to combine these two approaches to life, in order to find her own answers to what seems unanswerable.

It is simple, and quirky, and beautifully written.  The characters are painted in eccentric shades of colour, and Minou creates an alternate and enchanting world in her imagination.  I wasn't so keen on the flashbacks which I found disorientating, and I know some readers object to the lack of plot. 

But if you love exquisite imagery and whimsical tales, I guarantee you will love this.