Stacey's Reviews > In the Red

You know that feeling you get when you wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that you've had a really strange (possibly really great) dream, but the visual snippets you remember won't cooperate by getting in linear order? That's what reading this book feels like. I always felt just a little off balance.

I loved the structure of In The Red - the interweaving of Romanian fairy tales with Romanian history (sometimes indistinguishably) helped feed the dream-like qualities of the book. The characters are never really very fleshed out, and some of the story lines are left open (kinda like real life). The end result will be, I think, a novel that keeps popping into my head - possibly years from now - just like those disorienting dreams that wake you up in the middle of the night.