Rachel Cantor

This book had some good ideas in it, but it was painful to read. My first petty complaint was that the author didn't use any quotation marks around speech. Then there are just weird turns of phrase everywhere, as if she's trying to show off her vocabulary... but it's like, why would you say "fossicked for lucre" when you could say "scrabbled for cash"? Or why would a society supposedly set in the future use cubits as a standard unit of measurement, and "versts" (which I had to look up, it's a long-obsolete Russian unit) instead of kilometres?

I dunno, as I say there were a few interesting things in it, but for those and other reasons the whole thing just felt like reading someone's fever dream. Also, the title is so undescriptive it's annoying.… (more)

Hegemonic fast-food entities, 13h century luminaries, and Jewish mysticism are key ingredients in Cantor's humorous melange of a debut that initially resembles nothing so much as a [a:Mark Leyner|4414|Mark Leyner|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1274163994p2/4414.jpg] novel, with its stab at high-concept, postmodern humor. Alas, the humor falls short of the mark and Cantor's writing and her characters aren't enough to unify the ambitious subject matter. My full review is href="http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/sciencefictionreviews/fl/A-Highly-Unlikely-Scenario-by-Rachel-Cantor.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_top">here.… (more)