Howtown

"Rossi warned me you'd be a smart ass."I shrugged. "He told me you were a good cop. I guess he was wrong about both of us."

Henry's steadily claiming a permanent seat as one of my favorite protagonists of all time.

when the layers of legalese wrapped around this story could've very well turned me off, the courtroom scenes proved to more engaging and frenzied than a bloody battle between two kingdoms. my legal knowledge consists of the unrealistic, fantastical depictions in Ace Attorney (you get a bazillion points in my book if you've played the games) - in other words, nonexistent - but this book cast a spell with every verbal lunge and parry, every complex maneuvering. my eyes played their own game of ping-pong, jumping back and forth across the page. in all my restlessness, i wore out the poor, abused fabric on the edge of my seat. i love Henry at his every stage, in his every form, but he ripens into an absolute showstopper when he's flexing those glorious wings of competence.

Michael Nava's prose is brilliant and tackles critical themes with a smooth elegance rarely seen. the exploration of the ways HIV status can affect relationships, laying bare the wall between infected and non-infected populations, upheaving false conflations made in the public eye - i can't look away in spite of, or maybe because of, the underlying anguish that accompanied life in a way i'll never truly know in my own.

on a side note, i wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Gregory Ashe spent time studying some of this author's expressive descriptions. they felt reminiscent of one another, at least at their core and feeling, though i hope my assumption doesn't come across presumptuous. regardless, i do love when writers paint settings more vividly in my mental landscape than what i could possibly see with the naked eye.