Jigs and Reels
Registered by gillg of South Perth, Western Australia Australia on 7/30/2007
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
3 journalers for this copy...
Amazon.co.uk Review
The quirky tales in Joanne Harris' first collection of short stories, Jigs and Reels, can best be summed up in two words: malevolent and mischievous. As with many of her full-length novels, Harris manages to cleverly combine ordinary--even humdrum--situations and characters with the extraordinary and the unexpected. Tales with a twist indeed.
Harris lets her formidable imagination run riot in Jigs and Reels. This is a rich and wondrous Pandora's box of the odd, the strange, the weird and the downright wicked. Many of her protagonists wreak satisfying revenge on the unsuspecting, in both comical and cringingly gory fashion.
Long enough to get your teeth into, but short enough to read in a flash of the eye, these 22 stories are startlingly different--from pensioners with a penchant for Manolos, to a magical cookbook that bites back; from school reunions with a difference to adventure games taken seriously. And what characters pop out of their slender pages, as large and as deeply rounded as in any novel. Ladies who breakfast at Tesco's, with dark secrets to mull over; limbless swimmers who fall dangerously in love, honeymooners who fall prey to the aphrodisiac qualities of fish, authors whose long-forgotten, half-finished novels come back to haunt them and lottery winners who bet on the ultimate, impossible odds.
In her introduction, Harris says she finds the process of short-story writing slow and difficult and accepts that success is never guaranteed. In truth, not every tale here works, but when it does, it is stunning--and in the spirit of one of her literary heroes, Ray Bradbury--lingers teasingly in the sub-conscious.
Joanne Harris is an anarchic storyteller, delighting in taking her reader by surprise and leaving them reeling. --Carey Green
The quirky tales in Joanne Harris' first collection of short stories, Jigs and Reels, can best be summed up in two words: malevolent and mischievous. As with many of her full-length novels, Harris manages to cleverly combine ordinary--even humdrum--situations and characters with the extraordinary and the unexpected. Tales with a twist indeed.
Harris lets her formidable imagination run riot in Jigs and Reels. This is a rich and wondrous Pandora's box of the odd, the strange, the weird and the downright wicked. Many of her protagonists wreak satisfying revenge on the unsuspecting, in both comical and cringingly gory fashion.
Long enough to get your teeth into, but short enough to read in a flash of the eye, these 22 stories are startlingly different--from pensioners with a penchant for Manolos, to a magical cookbook that bites back; from school reunions with a difference to adventure games taken seriously. And what characters pop out of their slender pages, as large and as deeply rounded as in any novel. Ladies who breakfast at Tesco's, with dark secrets to mull over; limbless swimmers who fall dangerously in love, honeymooners who fall prey to the aphrodisiac qualities of fish, authors whose long-forgotten, half-finished novels come back to haunt them and lottery winners who bet on the ultimate, impossible odds.
In her introduction, Harris says she finds the process of short-story writing slow and difficult and accepts that success is never guaranteed. In truth, not every tale here works, but when it does, it is stunning--and in the spirit of one of her literary heroes, Ray Bradbury--lingers teasingly in the sub-conscious.
Joanne Harris is an anarchic storyteller, delighting in taking her reader by surprise and leaving them reeling. --Carey Green
Off to Bellamack- Happy New Year!
To be honest I can't remember exactly which day this book arrived but it was in the middle of a month of family dramas so I forgot to journal it then. My apologies. Thanks so much gillg I love Joanne Harris and am really looking forward to reading it :)
Posting today , enjoy :)
Having met gillg at a few BC Meetups, it kind of feels like this book has come home!! :-) BellaMack has sent me a lovely bag of books and this was one of them. I've read 'Chocolat' but none of Joanne Harris' other books and this looks like great fun!
I finally started this a week or so ago! This is only my second Joanne Harris, after having read Chocolat, which I did enjoy (though to be fair, it was a long time ago si I don't remember much about it). However, I wasn't so taken with the short stories I read here. They were all pleasant enough, but there was a sameness between a lot of them - many are fairly short and told from the point of view of a narrator.
Journal Entry 7 by KLL at Wild Poppy Cafe in Fremantle, Western Australia Australia on Saturday, October 27, 2012
Released 11 yrs ago (10/28/2012 UTC) at Wild Poppy Cafe in Fremantle, Western Australia Australia
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
Releasing at the October Perth Bookcrossing Meetup. Join the group at: http://www.facebook.com/groups/232647480128716/
