The Random World of Reading discussion
This topic is about
Invocation, Book I
Promote Your Book
>
Invocation for the Kindle - all six books for 99p / 99c!
date
newest »
newest »
Invocation Book I
Invocation Books II-III
Invocation Books IV-VI
Some bits of reviews:
"If JG Ballard had written an Enid Blyton girl's own adventure on Facebook under the influence of mind-altering drugs, he might have ended up with something like Invocation. Or maybe not. Jo L Walton's hallucinatory anti-fantasy fantasy is a kind of Harry Potter for the Contemporary Poet, a neurological black comedy, a Clockwork Orange for the 21st century, a satire in which contemporary Britain dissolves in the acids of the hyperreal, a paranoid critique, a nonsense that constantly threatens an ambush by alarming lucidity. Being like everything, it's not like anything else. 'Anything that is unlike anything else is sad,' says one of Walton's uncharacters. Maybe. But in this case, it's also perilously funny. Did I say it was gloriously written? Perhaps that's how Walton gets away with it. I'm awaiting the final instalment with pleasurable trepidation."
— Alison Croggon
"With some of the best action sequences I've ever read, it often seems like movement or action in Invocation is us in the throes of Merleau-Ponty, where stuff happens not through the desire to achieve a result but as a way of relieving an unmanageable tension. And it's full of tension, peaking and troughing and hinging and swinging and all that through forests, cafes, cares and caves of attention, engagement and emotion [...] But I haven't gotten across at all how fun, mysterious and thrilling this book is, which it undoubtedly is, populated by wise-cracking teenagers and their a-level art projects. The laughter which could also be chittering teeth, on a bench, under the rain, in The Meadows. Beautifully pitched, this book does that thing that David Foster Wallace spoke of of 'comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.' In abundance."
— Colin Herd
"Then the shape and places in Myfanwy’s dreams start to become familiar to her; possibly a half-remembrance of a period spent in Scotland as a small child. And off she and Kitty go to [Spoiler!], in the wonderful way of young adults in such fictions; off to solve a mystery, without apparently any qualms over parental worry or, indeed, much to do with any formal systems of investigation (the Police have little part of this—well, of course not, it’s a quest). And there the story just cuts (this is book one). Having recognised (possibly) a small side-street, and on it a house that feels ‘right,’ Kitty knocks upon the door, it is opened, and— [...] It’s a mean trick, because of course that sort of ending will leave the reader frustrated enough to get the next one and read it, if only to satisfy a need for some sort of order. This entire first book is pure set-up: character, situation, geography of time and place. So it zips, it froths and it reads excitingly. As such, it’s not so much a mean trick as a damn sneaky bit of structuring. Full kudos to Walton for underhand craftiness on that one. And extra points for making a story and a main character that we come to enjoy. Myfanwy’s personality, as young as she is, is rather more redolent of a clever authorial mind working on her behalf than having a pure life of her own, but it is entirely forgivable, given how much FUN the whole thing is. [...] while it may dangle in places with unexplained detail, and bounce along with a language-based energy that sometimes feels a little alienating to someone no longer in the first blush of youth, it is perhaps because of these very factors that makes this a likable and highly entertaining read."
— Kate Onyett
"It made me feel like a character."
— Ian Heames
"If I read this when I was 19 all would have been clear."
— Robert Kiely
"Mint."
— Verity Spott
UK links:
Invocation Book I
Invocation Books II-III
Invocation Books IV-VI