Ali Shaw's The Girl With Glass Feet presents a fantastic modern-day fairy tale that is truly as straight-forward as its title: Ida Maclaird's feet are turning into glass. It is a malady that struck her during a visit to the St. Hauda's Land archipelago, a place to which she returns in an attempt to uncover both the reason for her transformation and (she hopes) some cure.

As the central crisis in the book, Ida's illness (though, as we're counseled, it is not really an illness) provides a mechanism for examining failures of bravery and the desperation of fear. There are few characters in the book to whom we can look up. They all seem to be trapped in a depressed gloom mirrored by the misty, cold, monochrome environment of the islands. And the intertwining stories give us no respite, no hope for recovery. Every character we encounter seems trapped in his own lonely gulag.

At the same time, there are some bright moments: Henry Fuwa's interactions with the moth-winged bulls and Midas Crook's experience of the world through his camera lens present psychologically realistic portraits of people who seem in so many ways suffocated coming up for air. More than anything, Midas's burgeoning relationship with Ida illustrates the power of a little positive human interaction.

It's enough to draw Midas out of a carefully constructed loneliness. One wonders, however, whether it is enough to mitigate the contamination of the past - while the lives of the characters become increasingly show more intertwined, their actions are increasingly muddled by private and often long-ended dramas.

The fabulist elements in the book are so thoroughly integrated into the narration as to seem, often, like the most natural mystery imaginable; the clean frankness of Shaw's writing engulfs his readers in the dreamlike lamentations rising from every corner of St. Hauda's Land. show less