A review by brassaf
The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe

4.0

Since I missed book club discussion on this book I wrote down my thoughts. Now the whole world can read these thoughts. Aren't you lucky!

1. The book kept me guessing throughout. What was the plot? Just when I thought I stumbled across it, it wasn’t it.

2. The Bronwynator sounds an awful lot like my wife's nickname "The Stacinator." This made the book even more entertaining than it would have been.

3. The story was so refreshingly different from anything I’ve read. (Gasp—a book I liked with 0 spaceships in it?!)

4. The characters were so...real. They were frank, honest, relatable, intriguing, and at the same time all mysterious.

5. I kept waiting for some big monologue about who the Tufa really were. But never got it. Absolutely enjoyed the alternative unraveling of this mystery one detail at a time.

6. There are two passages that gave me pause. One bothered me, and the other made me laugh out loud. Here's the one that made me go hmmm.

This is exactly the kind of crap that made me want to leave in the first place. Just because we're ancient doesn't mean we can't make new ways. Are we mud-stuck like the Christians or the Jews? Do we have to take our instructions from a book written for a culture that died two thousand years ago? Or do we write our own songs?

Here's the one that made me laugh out loud:

Bronwyn ran into her room, the first time in months she'd moved that quickly. She fell halfway onto the bed and began sobbing, clenching her teetch against the sound. She didn't want to wake either of her brothers, and she sure didn't want her father to know she'd seen anything. My God, what were they thinking, carrying on like teenagers? They were both in their forties.

I accept the first quote as a personal challenge to not be a Christian who is mud stuck. I accept the second as a personal challenge to hold on to my teenage 40s as long as possible.