![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysI rarely read two similar books in a row. I make a conscious decision go from one style to another as I move from book to book. However after I read Set this House in Order, I just had to go for another similar tone and style. Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart immediately stood out from the rest of the to read shelf as the best candidate. And what a good candidate it was. Apart from a couple of breaks to put loads into the washing machine, I read this in one session. Admittedly it isn't a large book but it did grip my interest.
Where Ruff and Stewart show similarity is the way they can take the unusual and render it real by use of simple matter of fact story telling. They weave the strange into the normal lives of the characters. And since the characters are well defined and real, the strange becomes real as well. For Ruff it was MPD, but for today's book it is the ability to see ghosts.
The book is set in Texas and the ghost viewer is a bit of a slacker. He does get to start up a business as a kind of Ghost viewer consultant, but this is no Ghostbusters. Is life is in a fair amount of strife as a result of the breakup of his marriage, even though that was many years earlier. The ghosts are not necessarily friendly and his stability is in real doubt as he tries to deal with things. It is also a book about family - for a shortish book it winds itself around a lot of people briefly touching on their tales. Which brings me to another similarity between the two books - the effective use of flashbacks to explain the mental states of the characters.
Readers of previous Sean Stewart books might realise that his work tends to have a tendency to peak in a hurried crescendo that can make things a bit confusing - at least for me. This book does not suffer from that and is much the better for it. I had to import this book from the States because the local distributors do not bring all of Stewart's work into the country - I should be mumbling about lowest common denominator at this point, but I won't as I am in too good a mood after reading this book - perhaps because it almost had a happy(ish) ending.
Where Ruff and Stewart show similarity is the way they can take the unusual and render it real by use of simple matter of fact story telling. They weave the strange into the normal lives of the characters. And since the characters are well defined and real, the strange becomes real as well. For Ruff it was MPD, but for today's book it is the ability to see ghosts.
The book is set in Texas and the ghost viewer is a bit of a slacker. He does get to start up a business as a kind of Ghost viewer consultant, but this is no Ghostbusters. Is life is in a fair amount of strife as a result of the breakup of his marriage, even though that was many years earlier. The ghosts are not necessarily friendly and his stability is in real doubt as he tries to deal with things. It is also a book about family - for a shortish book it winds itself around a lot of people briefly touching on their tales. Which brings me to another similarity between the two books - the effective use of flashbacks to explain the mental states of the characters.
Readers of previous Sean Stewart books might realise that his work tends to have a tendency to peak in a hurried crescendo that can make things a bit confusing - at least for me. This book does not suffer from that and is much the better for it. I had to import this book from the States because the local distributors do not bring all of Stewart's work into the country - I should be mumbling about lowest common denominator at this point, but I won't as I am in too good a mood after reading this book - perhaps because it almost had a happy(ish) ending.