![]() ![]() ![]() It's late April in an English village and unseasonal snow is falling on a cottage: "It falls on the thatch, concealing the moss and the mouse damage, smoothing out the undulations, filling in the hollows and slips, melting where it touches the bricks of the chimney. ![]() The opening pages of the novel are chock full of glorious descriptive language. Children's books often redeem them with some lesson about how outsiders are just like everyone else, despite their strange appearances or ramshackle houses or mysterious actions.īut how often, in our stories, are oddballs allowed to remain exactly who they are? How often do they take center stage as main characters and reorient our view of what is "normal"? How often are such characters given rich, complex, and interior lives, complete with sorrows, talents, opinions, and flaws? Claire Fuller's new novel, Unsettled Ground, does just that. Fairy tales sometimes cast them as witches, or as beautiful young royals cursed to live as beasts. Every small town (and every neighborhood in every city) has its oddballs, the people who live on the fringes, a little out of step with everyone else. ![]()
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