Book review: Veronica
So, as you probably haven’t noticed, I’ve largely given up the “Buffalo Chip Book Reviews.” Mainly due to limited reading time these past few months, plus a lack of anyone appearing to give a crap. Still, I’ve got some time to kill right now and have kind of browsed-out most of my usual intarweb reading list. And I would like to process a few thoughts on one book I recently finished:
Veronica, by Nicholas Christopher.
This was one of those random finds while browsing the shelves at the library, and an example of why it’s worth doing so I suppose. I’m not sure what it was about the spine which made me pull it off the shelf, but the cover is interesting, and the blurb met the “well, this seems so strange I kind of have to give it a go” criteria for coming home with me.
When I first started reading, admittedly, I had some doubts. The story seemed a little too jumpy, a little too coy and elliptical, while the scene descriptions often seemed weirdly over-detailed. And to some extent, these and other criticisms can really be applied to the entire book, but Veronica ends up making up for it and, in some ways, even making a virtue of these qualities.
For an absolute executive summary evaluation, I can only describe Veronica as a kind of hallucinatory fever dream. Trying to explain it beyond that is possibly a waste of time, though I’ll try: it’s set mostly in New York, though it’s a kind of magic-underground New York. The plot, if it’s possible to summarize, is the story of a photographer on a quest for a mysterious woman named Veronica, who is meanwhile on a quest for her vanished magician father. There’s magic, time travel, fluid identity, sex, Tibetan mythology, and lots of vodka and black tea. (As I say, daunting to describe beyond “fever dream.”) (more…)
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