Sidonie, a young woman who is a book lover, has a used leather-bound book in her hands in the opening paragraphs of the story. As she holds the book, she feels the book is talking to her. She decides to repair the book to her liking and give it a new personality by cutting out some of its worn-out pages and adding one green and one blue eye with eyelashes at its cover since she feels the book can read her mind and talk to her.

With each step of the repair process, Sidonie feels more and more attached to the book, but the book is like a voyeur watching her. There are still some pages blank at the end of the book, which eventually will be written on by Sidonie and her friend, an antique book-seller who senses what the book is really about.

What Sidonie will have to discover, eventually, is that inside the book, there is a handsome man, the wizard Blaise who hid himself there using magic to stay out of reach of his enemies. Will there be a love story between Blaise and Sidonie or something sinister? This should be left to the readers’ discovery.

I especially liked the opening of the book as the-book-reading-the-reader as well as the-reader-reading-the-book idea appealed to me. Then the idea that those who touch the book can become aware of their darkest or strongest feelings was the second good idea.

It is easy to relate to Sidonie’s character if one is also a book lover. Her feelings of remorse when she found out she had been torturing the man hiding inside the book with her repairs were touching. Blaise’s character is a difficult one akin to the beast in the fairytale, Beauty and the Beast.

The premise and the idea of the book are highly imaginative, and the descriptions draw vivid pictures. I liked the setup much more than the middle and the ending, as the opening suggests a powerful mystery at first.

It helps that the book’s or rather Blaise's point of view is printed in italics. Or else, people would be mixed up about the story’s point of view, and an otherwise clever plot would be murky.

The word choices are fine and the storytelling compels the reader to read on. What I would have liked would be a better explanation of in what ways the book and the man were the same or different, since Blaise can appear as a man with his skin all in print and can make love to Sidonie. Because I don’t enjoy plots to be too unpredictable and murky, the book’s relationship to the man or its being of the same body with Blaise could be foreshadowed within the first several pages, even if from the beginning, there were hints that the book had supernatural powers.

Then, as much as Sidonie’s remorse was so real and touching, I didn’t like the idea of torture, be it that its imagery is by proxy.

Still, I think the writer has a strong voice and a very inventive imagination.

passing time.

the imaginative idea of a book that we are reading can read us back.

the story's construction. I felt that the story was all over the place, and some readers could feel lost.

erase it off my kindle immediately, which I did.

interested in the beginning and annoyed in the middle and the end.

Emma V. Leech.

It is imaginative; however, it is a good idea to read about it first, since where the book stands and where the man is gets mixed up.

It is easy to become confused with the way and sequence that the plot is presented.

When it is a supernatural story, I like its composition and characters to be superior to the books in other genres. This is because the supernatural genres already ask too much of the readers.

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Created Mar 19, 2018 at 6:55pm • Submit your own review...