Sheri Holman

So far so very good. If you know me, I suppose the fact that a book about Christian pilgrims in the 15th century as told from the perspective of a priest with a hardcore obsession with relics of Saint Katherine of Alexandria, all trying to get to Sinai by boat and then land, combined with a whodunnit kind of page turner mystery attracted me is not a surprise. The author has a sly kind of writing, and knows how to turn a phrase. Trying to read slow to savor it, but having trouble putting it show more down. Dense, odd, tough, funny, and clever. So far, it is a most fine $1 book bin score! show less

I don't know anyone to whom I could recommend this book, but it has stayed with me years after reading it. It's possibly the most repellent book on my all-time favorites list. It's grotesque, compelling, and quite unlike anything I've ever read. The plot involves a monk devoted to St. Catherine of Alexandria, his patron, a sinister translator, a young woman who is either a lunatic or a saint, a medieval pilgrimage, and holy relics including the titular tongue.

Sheri Holman is an astonishing writer, and this is the first of her novels that I'd read. Part Dickens in its depiction of lives of poverty and social injustice, part Bram Stoker in its gothicness at times. Holman creates unique and memorable, even haunting, characters, both sympathetic and unsavory, and lets us see their hearts without imposing her judgments on us. The introductory scene with Foz and Les Chats Savants is truly one of the most memorable things I've ever read.

A poor man's 'Crimson Petal and the White' (Faber). Holman states in the reader's guide at the back of the Ballantine edition that she was inspired by Dickens' 'Bleak House', but this is presumably a Dickens born in America, barely on nodding terms with London, and born over a hundred years too late. Although an interesting concept, with informative background into the 1832 cholera epidemic and the extreme poverty of a northern England town, Holman misses the mark with her dark study of show more nineteenth century life. The narrative is littered with anachronisms (gold lame, in the 1830s?), American phrases and colloquialisms (blocks instead of streets, charley horse instead of cramp, diapers, candy, hairdos, and even a white picket fence!); the dialogue is badly written (she should have had an English editor check over her 'bad language', as the blue-tongued landlord sounds like a five year old experimenting with naughty words!) and peppered with random attempts at local dialect; and her characters are more caricatures than vivid personalities. The second person narration suits the style and setting of the novel, but it's been better executed elsewhere, and although Holman doesn't censor the horrors of disease and prostitution, the suggestion of a happy ending for Gustine and Pink seems tacked on after nearly three hundred pages of misery and degradation. Read Michel Faber's 'Crimson Petal' instead, or indeed Dickens' 'Bleak House'. show less