Progress in Going Bovine

At this point, I'm roughly 120 pages into the book, and it's every bit as good as the Gemma Doyle trilogy. It's a little stranger, but I've come to expect nothing less from Libba. She's really into possible hallucinations. Gemma had quite a few during her series, and Cameron has had almost as many. Which totally sucks for him.

One thing I love about Libba's writing is that she expects that her readers are bright. They don't have to be geniuses, but she's also not writing for brainless teenage girls but want to appear smart by carrying around a large book. She doesn't write for young adults as if they are unable of comprehending complex characters and emotions, yet she writes these things a language with which they'll easily identify. This isn't Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family, but it also isn't...oh...let's just say Twilight. I don't like picking on those books as much as I appear to. I own them all, and they present an interesting story. I just have problems with character glorification, horrible children's names, and protagonists of best selling novels being complete Mary Sues.

ANYWAY!

Back to Going Bovine...if you've read any or all of Libba's previous works, you know you need to use a lot of your imagination. You'll definitely have to stretch your imagination much further in this book. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I would liken it to Maureen Johnson's Devilish, if you've read it (also a great book). It's much easier to insert magic into a fantasy past or in its own little sector of our own world which is also somewhat stuck in the past. Take, for instance, a book everyone's heard of (unless you've been living under Everest for the past twelve years), Harry Potter. It's easy to accept magic or odd events because the majority of them happen away from us. They happen at Hogwarts or other wizarding world locations. And the wizarding world has its own government, its own dress code (sort of), its own...well, pretty much everything. The way wizards and witches normally dress is so different from how we dress now, that it makes them an "other," taking them away from our own world. In Going Bovine, we're presented with the here and now. Okay, the Texas and now.

Seeing, though, that it is almost Wednesday and I'm only a quarter of the way done...well, you know this means goodbye for now.