The Burning Girl - Hardcover

Holly Phillips

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809550652 ISBN 13: 9780809550654

Publisher: Prime Books, 2006

Synopsis

• A young woman trapped between worlds is forced to take sides in a war, take control of herself . . . and her power.

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Reviews

Canadian Phillips's challenging first novel, a dense literary fantasy, requires two readings—first to appreciate the sensuous prose, second to get some idea of the plot. On release from the hospital, Ryder "Rye" Coleman has inexplicable cuts and scars all over her body that sometimes open when she feels feverish, making her bleed. She also suffers from synesthesia and amnesia. When Rye follows a man home after he saves her life in an alley, he provides her with a fantastic explanation for all the strangeness: a refugee from another world persuaded the two of them to help foil a plot to conquer Earth, then betrayed them. Rye soon discovers that she has the unique power to travel from world to world, though she can't control it—and that makes her valuable to the people in the alley, who kidnap her and her savior, Bardo, an ex-cop with secrets of his own. Rye's fevered, synesthesiac dreams create an internal world as vivid as the book's external world, though it's often hard to tell them apart. Phillips is also the author of a story collection, In the Palace of Repose (2005). (June)
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Rye Coleman, 22, emerges from a hospital after seven weeks of fever and bleeding from lesions all over her skin with a six-year hole in her memory. Working a job distributing advertising fliers, she vaguely recognizes a man she follows home as the fever and bleeding return. He and Rye were involved with a so-called witch from another world, one of three linked by a gate that Rye somehow facilitates. War between two of the worlds could engulf the third, Earth, and who controls the gate affects all three. Phillips treats what may seem a rather routine sf/fantasy setup utterly originally, focusing on Rye's amnesiac, semidelirious perspective to the exclusion of other points of view that might explain what is going on and why. The stories in In the Palace of Repose (2005) were so understated, cool, and congenial that Phillips' violent, harsh, and febrile first novel comes as a shock, perhaps especially on the last page--unless, of course, you savor uncertainty, having your sense perceptions scrambled, and brutal disillusion. Genuinely extraordinary. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Prime Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809550652
• ISBN 13: 9780809550654
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296