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A Stir of Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Thirteen-year-old Susan slips out from under the thumb of her abusive father through friends and communing with a haunted house. Slight, strange, more horror than fantasy. By which I mean that the supernatural elements feel as though they are . . . extensions? Reflections? Of-a-piece? . . . nearly inextricable from the story of internal psychological strife – the fear and depression and self-destruction. Rather than being moving elements for their own sake. Quibble with my definition, whatever, I'll just change it again in a few months anyway.

Put it this way -- a central character is the ghost of a boy who suicided many years ago, and they find his skeleton in a closet. It's that kind of book.

Two anti-climactic to really get me. I'm confused about why this, out of all of her catalog, is the only title I can find in audio. I'm not intrigued enough to put myself to the extra brain effort of text-to-speeching a novel of hers. (When you must absorb tens of thousands of words in artificial voices every day in professional settings, the desire to do it for leisure basically vanishes. Which is a shame given only a tiny fraction of a percent of the books in the world are in audio, but part of the problem is I'm usually too tired to care.)




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