Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2010
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts, a mainlander who has visited the islands only once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.
Midas Crook is a young loner who has lived on the islands his entire life. When he meets Ida, something about her sad, defiant spirit pierces his emotional defenses. As Midas helps Ida come to terms with her affliction, she gradually unpicks the knots of his heart. Love must be paid in precious hours and, as the glass encroaches, time is slipping away fast. Will they find a way to stave off the spread of the glass?
The Girl with Glass Feet is a dazzlingly imaginative and magical first novel, a love story to treasure.
"Both love story and dirge, Shaw's novel flows gracefully and is wonderfully dreamlike, with the danger of the islands matched by the characters' dark pasts." - Publishers Weekly
"Combining magic realism, the conventions of a romance novel, and a British sense of practicality, this charming first novel creates a new fable." - Booklist
"...features some inspired prose and haunting imagery. Still, the bleak tone and unrelenting tales of woe will weigh heavily on most readers..." - Library Journal
"At its best, this strikingly visual novel shrugs off self-consciousness and a sense of strain to become captivatingly ethereal." - Kirkus Reviews
"...an ingenious story so deft it defies the obvious label "quirky".... A magical fable of fate and resignation." - The Guardian (UK)
This information about The Girl with Glass Feet was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ali Shaw graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in English literature. Since then he has since worked as a bookseller and at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. He can be found online at www.alishaw.co.uk.
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