This week, having finished with Alice, I have moved on to another quasi-fairy (or is that faerie?) tale, The Darkest Part of the Forest, by Holly Black, of Coldest Girl in Coldtown fame.
Once upon a time, a little girl found a corpse in the woods.
Her parents had raised the girl and her brother with the same benign neglect with which they’d taken care of the three cats and dachshund named Whiskey that already roamed around the little house. They’d have their long-haired, alt-rock friends over, drink wine, jam on their guitars, and talk about art late into the night, letting the girl and boy run around without diapers.
Mmm, free-range parenting …
Similarly to Coldest Girl, this book takes place in a world that’s essentially the real one, with iPods and YouTube and Mira Grant’s book Feed and suchlike thing. Oh and it’s also got changelings, faeries (can’t have changelings without ’em!), pixies, barghests, redcaps, and miscellaneous other creatures, including the hag (a Greenhag, I suspect) that’s responsible for the aforementioned corpse. The forest referenced in the title, being a place where a large concentration of such creatures are to be found and photographed, has become a tourist attraction and a major source of revenue for the town nearby — despite the fact that at least one or two tourists are stated to disappear or be killed in the forest every year, especially the ones who do stupid things, such as try to take selfies with monsters. (None of this, of course, will be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with Coldest Girl …)
Meanwhile, speaking of things that are set in almost the real world, editing continues on Father’s Books!
When he got down to the station, they made him sit in a waiting area for nearly an hour, with nothing to do but watch the local criminal element pass by. He didn’t see much worth looking at, mostly drunks and hookers, and Bentonville’s hookers were just as subpar as everything else it had to offer.
Ah, yes, the days before smartphones (this book is set in the mid-1990s), when one had to entertain oneself in the police station by looking at actual hookers, instead of being able to call up better ones on the Internet …
Viscosity 