Fauna
Registered by jewishlibrarian of North York, Ontario Canada on 6/21/2011
This book is in a Controlled Release!
This book is in a Controlled Release!
1 journaler for this copy...
Overall, I enjoyed this book.
As a Torontonian, I loved the (mostly) Toronto setting and could easily visualize the places described (which were described well).
As a bibliophile, I loved Letty's obsession with book collecting, though it wasn't clear if she actually read all of the books that filled virtually every nook & cranny of her home. My own collection isn't that bad ... not yet. And I haven't read half of the books that I've saved up for "some day".
I also appreciated all of the literary references and the lengthy excerpts from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia (book 1 : The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
As an animal lover, I enjoyed the quirky cast of characters: Edal, the wildlife officer ; Stephen, the "soldier boy"; Guy, the owner of the junkyard-cum-sanctuary (for both people and animals) ; Lily, the teenage runaway ; Kate the worker at the Canine Rehabilitation Centre. It was cool to get a look at what animal life is like, which is well narrated by York.
At times, the postmodern style (going back & forth in time, allowing us to get the backstory on the characters) and the shifting of the story from one character to another (which included the antagonist - Darius, the self-proclaimed "Coyote Cop") got confusing.
I was also a bit off-put by the introduction of Kyla as a minor character. It felt as if York originally intended to do more with her, changed her mind and all-but-discarded her, leaving in just the one scene with her and Stephen's botched attempt to see her again.
I don't want to put too many spoilers here, so I'll just say that I found the climactic confrontation between Stephen and Darius towards the end of the book to be rather anticlimactic and a bit of a disappointment.
As a Torontonian, I loved the (mostly) Toronto setting and could easily visualize the places described (which were described well).
As a bibliophile, I loved Letty's obsession with book collecting, though it wasn't clear if she actually read all of the books that filled virtually every nook & cranny of her home. My own collection isn't that bad ... not yet. And I haven't read half of the books that I've saved up for "some day".
I also appreciated all of the literary references and the lengthy excerpts from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia (book 1 : The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
As an animal lover, I enjoyed the quirky cast of characters: Edal, the wildlife officer ; Stephen, the "soldier boy"; Guy, the owner of the junkyard-cum-sanctuary (for both people and animals) ; Lily, the teenage runaway ; Kate the worker at the Canine Rehabilitation Centre. It was cool to get a look at what animal life is like, which is well narrated by York.
At times, the postmodern style (going back & forth in time, allowing us to get the backstory on the characters) and the shifting of the story from one character to another (which included the antagonist - Darius, the self-proclaimed "Coyote Cop") got confusing.
I was also a bit off-put by the introduction of Kyla as a minor character. It felt as if York originally intended to do more with her, changed her mind and all-but-discarded her, leaving in just the one scene with her and Stephen's botched attempt to see her again.
I don't want to put too many spoilers here, so I'll just say that I found the climactic confrontation between Stephen and Darius towards the end of the book to be rather anticlimactic and a bit of a disappointment.
Released to a librarian colleague at the AJL conference at the Marriott Chateau Champlain.
