Dust by Joan Frances Turner

Sometimes, when I give a book a middling rating, it means the book was middling throughout. This is not one of those times. I intensely disliked the first half of Dust, and it took me about a month to get through it. The second half, I loved, and read in one day.

Dust’s greatest strength — and also its greatest drawback — is that Joan Frances Turner writes description extremely well. She has the gift of evoking that one perfect image that puts you right there in the character’s mind: a dimly remembered strawberry, or a lost connection described as:

a light shining from a farmhouse window on some dark, empty highway, streaking brightly across your windshield as you drive past, and then fading. And then gone.

It becomes a drawback when Turner conjures up, with the same skil... Read More