Book Review: Carpe Glitter by Cat Rambo

This one totally intrigued me upfront – the cover, the blurb, Cat Rambo: what’s not to love?? I requested a review copy and was delighted to receive it. I dug in eagerly – the opening grabbed me straightaway – it was full of mysterious intrigue, hints of dark family drama, secrets and hoarded treasures (and not-so-treasures)… It was, in a word, sublime. Until it wasn’t…

Weird.

I was loving it, flipping pages and trying to figure out what on earth was coming next, and then all of a sudden things started slowing down and getting a little oblique and then in a rush of motion it hit an oil-slick and ended. Seriously, it felt that herky-jerky – one minute tension was building with the click-clack of a roller coaster dragging you uphill then, in an instant, the bottom fell out. But it wasn’t really the bottom, it was the teeny hill they toss in to throw you off-kilter before – BAM! – the big one drops the bottom out of your stomach and you whip around a bit before slamming into the station.

Yeah, I really drew out that metaphor – it actually took longer to type it than the conclusion of the book did to read. Seriously.

I must confess, such sudden shifts in tension and pacing throw me – and generally not in a good way. I really loved the way this one was developing, and the sudden skew to the side wasn’t to my taste. It felt clipped and harried. If the whole thing had been written in that style, it probably would have cut 40 pages from this (and made it a short story) and it would have worked. If the denoument and conclusion had been written in the style of the opening it would have added another 50-100 pages (making it a novel, not novelette) and it would have worked. As it was, it felt a little cobbled together, like a short story and novel had a baby and this was the result.

Stylistically, Rambo does a great job setting the scene and her characters were a great hodgepodge of personalities and quirks – I would have liked to see a lot more about why they were who they were, but again, that’s about me and long-form storytelling. All in all it was a very cool idea but the execution wasn’t as satisfying as I hoped. I strongly suspect my general tendency toward novels and away from short stories is the basis for that – if you are more of an aficionado of shorts, this approach may not jar you as it did me.

Thanks to the publisher, Meerkat Press, for my obligation-free review copy.