Book Reviews by Michele Filgate

Love can be as fragile as a glass heart. Ali Shaw’s magical-realism infused novel, The Girl with Glass Feet: A Novel , is set on a strange archipelago, St. Hauda’s Land, and follows an unusual couple. 

Midas Crook is a distant man and photographer who sees the world through his camera; so much so that it’s like an appendage of his body.   He meets Ida Maclaird, a girl with a very strange ailment.  Ida’s feet have turned into glass, and she fears that the rest of her body will gradually be transformed.  She has returned to the islands to look for a man named Henry who may or may not have an answer to her problem.

It makes sense that a playwright who naturally works with the difficulties of dialogue as part of his craft would be able to apply those skills to a novel.  Victor Lodato’s first novel, Mathilda Savitch: A Novel , has a lot of things going for it.  He has the too-smart-for-her-own-good young narrator (Mathilda), who is dealing with the death of her older sister.  He has the absent family members who are half-blinded by their own grief.  But most of all, he has voice.  Mathilda’s words spill from the page and capture a mixture of anxiety and recognition like the most gripping monologues manage to do.