Book #113: Glimpse

Title: Glimpse
Author: Carol Lynch Williams

Of all the books I read for the Whitney Awards this year, Carol Lynch Williams's The Chosen One was my favorite. I loved the way it was a book intended for young readers, but it dealt with hard issues and didn't talk down to an audience. I loved that Kyra, the protagonist, was strong, sympathetic, and imperfect. I loved the way Williams captured the sense of place in that novel.

Carol Lynch Williams is coming to my Young Adult novel workshop on Tuesday, and since I loved The Chosen One so much, I decided to read Glimpse. All of the elements I appreciated in The Chosen One are also present in Glimpse. This isn't a book for readers who don't want to read about hard things-- the book opens with Hope's sister Liz attempting suicide, and we later learn that she tried to kill herself because the girls' mother, a prostitute, had been selling Liz to the men who came to the house.

Although the book is 496 pages long, I was able to read this book in a single sitting, in the bathtub, all before the water grew cold. The length is deceptive, since each page of the book looks like a poem, with two or three words on a line. I'm not sure why Williams chose this format, but it works well. She chose her words with such care that the story felt rich and fully drawn, despite the spareness of her prose. We've been talking in class about how most authors can cut their word count by 30 or 40%, and it seems like Williams was able to do that to an extreme level. I'm eager to hear her talk about her process of writing it on Tuesday.