The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw: Some Thoughts

I am not, by nature, a reader of fable, but I was sufficiently intrigued by recent reviews of Ali Shaw's The Girl with Glass Feet to go out and get myself a copy. This week, between too many things and in the midst of forceful weather, I read Girl through.

My experience reminded me of just how much room there is in the world for differing points of view. There's so much that is lovely about this book, particularly in the early pages when it doesn't matter, yet, whether things will coalesce; what matters is the quality of the imagination. And Shaw does have an imagination—conjuring odd, winged creatures, albino beasts, an icy bogland, and human characters who are strangely morose and strangely uplifted and on an increasingly complex collision course. The star of the story is a woman named Ida, monochrome and slowly turning to glass, who has come to St. Hauda's Land in search of answers. There she meets Midas Crook, a loner, and they become involved. Because everyone on the island seems to know everyone else, far more complications arise.

This is Shaw's debut novel, and in it he has uncorked so many plot lines and possibilities that the book began to feel, to me, deluged and, in places, forced together. Sometimes the language—often deliriously original and at once lyrical and crisp—spools away from itself, breaks down. Sometimes less happening might have been more powerful than more—might have given the reader more room to empathize with this purposefully unusual cast.

So that I am left wondering about this book and at the same time thrilled that a publishing house the size and heft of Henry Holt took on something so unexpected and rare. I like to see such chances taken—by a novelist, by a house, by a reading public that has very much put The Girl with Glass Feet on the map.