My review of Melanie Rae Thon's Silence and Song at Full Stop:
If Melanie Rae Thon is a writer less widely read than might be expected, given her skill in creating vivid characters and evoking an equally vivid sense of place, among the reasons for this would surely be the sheer intensity of her work, which can at times seem unremitting, even claustrophobic. Not only does she typically focus on distressed characters often facing the direst circumstances, but her compressed yet urgent prose so insistently attempts to encompass these characters and their situations, to describe, summarize, and account for their states of mind and being, that the reader either becomes captivated by the lyrical pulse of Thon’s language, or it can start to seem oppressive. This effect is especially pronounced in Thon’s most recent fiction, including her new book, Silence and Song, in which lilting language takes on much of the role assumed by plot in more ordinary fiction.
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