Finished a good book - "The Bone People" by Keri Hulme. It won the Booker award in 1985 - yeah, I'm almost two decades behind - but I wouldn't have likely enjoyed this book in '85 - I was reading Orwell, Lewis, re-reading Tolkien, and lots of sf - Asimov's Foundation books, Herbert's Dune books, oh, and a series by Stephen R. Donaldson called "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever"...though the last one isn't sf (which Donaldson is best known for) but a fantasy about a man with leprosy who travels to another world to fight the evil Lord Foul. It wasn't a particularly brilliant series, though the leprosy angle was interesting - it was recommended to me by a customer at the coffee shop I worked at - I don't know that I'd be as excited about it today if I reread the series.

But back to The Bone People - it is not only a well constructed tale, that incorporates Maori phrasing into the text (there's a glossary at the back) and thus becoming an interesting intersection of the postcolonial, but it also is an engaging story - I found myself caught up in the lives of the characters. In a book about abuse, I found it refreshing that the book avoids black and white categorizations, mostly through the characters' introspective passages, but also through some scenes that can only be described as magical realist. The narrative shifts from third to first person narration as well as from character to character. The character shifts can be disconcerting since it is occasionally difficult to tell at first glance who's narrating, but it's always possible to identify the speaker within a couple of paragraphs, unlike, say a book like "All the Pretty Horses" where you could be confused for pages at a time about who was speaking. In that case, the confusion was compounded by the fact that all his characters sounded the same.

The Bone People - good book if you're looking for an interesting summer read that makes you think.

Part of a conversation with a friend: ... she's a teeneager. I'd rather nail jello to a tree then argue with a teenager. I'd actually even prefer to reason for my life with a terrorist than rationalize with a teenager.

I loved the metaphor! feels very right...can you visualize the tree and the jello?