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February is persecuting the townspeople. It has been winter for more than three hundred days. All forms of flight are banned and the children have started to disappear, taken from their beds in the middle of the night. The priests hang ominous sheets of parchment on the trees, signed 'February'. And somewhere on the outskirts of the town lives February himself, with the girl who smells of honey and smoke... In short bursts of intensely poetic language, this beautifully strange and otherworldly first novel tells the story of the people in the town and their efforts to combat the mysterious spectre of February. Steeped in visual imagery, this is a hauntingly enigmatic modern fairy tale - in which nothing is as it seems.
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Strange. Disquieting. Depressing. We need February as much as June or July!
I didn't like the book in the beginning - I felt like I was in a nonsensical dream. The priests in the story really threw me off, but once the story got going, though the dream-like quality remained, the story began to take shape. For one fleeting moment in the story, I sympathized with February. Then my body stiffened and my fingers grew numb from the cold weather I was experiencing real-time as I read, and I got over it real quick. Die, February, die!
I'm not sure if it was a smart move picking this cold time of year to read this particular book on the coldest of NYC train platforms, but that's what I get for choosing to read books blind and without having read the backstory from reviews or the inside jacket.
This short, surreal fairy tale has some interesting imagery, plot progression, and characterization. But, then it's annoying and overly arty in those same areas now and again.
I almost wished for some illustrations like you'd find in old Grimm's fairy tale collections. This book, minus a few gruesome elements and language, could be an interesting children's book.
At times, I quite enjoyed how the author screws with font size, sentence structure, and other visual elements, which brought out the semi-poetic aspects of Shane Jones' writing.
But, the constant mentions of the girl who smells of honey and smoke and the use of parchment get soooo old. And interesting characters or plot lines get totally left behind, which would have made the book stronger.
All in all, interesting, but annoying from time to time. For the record, March is way worse than February for Chicagoans, so the prospect of an interminable February didn't seem quite as awful as the author may have liked.
