31 January, 2008

Red Spikes gets 5Q in VOYA

Which is the highest rating they give. Here is what Joe Sutliff Sanders has to say:
In ten sharp tales, Lanagan pushes the short story form and the genre of fantasy to their limits.

The secret of Australian Lanagan has been out since her last collection, Black Juice (HarperCollins, 2004/VOYA April 2005), was a Printz Award Honor Book, and her new work shows no drop in quality. Lanagan excels in her trademark ability to synthesize a kind of fantasy that reaches into the dark corners of human life and love without becoming jaded. These stories are turgid with love, loss, hope, despair, and the sense that there must be more to the world than that which can be touched with hands. Such rich emotional content gives the stories broad appeal, but they are written with such a keen sense of craftsmanship that they also offer a rewarding challenge to advanced readers. Each story has a steep learning curve, as Lanagan drops the reader into a fully developed situation with as little explanation as she can. The reader learns, after two or three such stories, to read the opening pages carefully, with no assumptions about protagonist, plot, or even genre. The result is stories that unsettle and explore. They are a pleasure at every level.
Aww, thanks, Joe!

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