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Welcome to my stop on the Paper Souls Blog Tour hosted by RBTL World of Books Blog Tours! Click here to follow along with the full tour schedule!
Title: Paper Souls
Author: Allie Burke
Series: Stand Alone
Publication date: September 9th 2014
Publisher: Booktrope
Genre: Dark Literary Fiction
Source: Copy for review
Purchase: Amazon Kindle | Amazon Print | B&N | Books A Million
From the author of the bestselling genre-defining Enchanters series, comes a new literary tour de force about Emily, a young woman balancing two worlds between her fingertips: the one that is real to her and the one that is real to everyone else...
The question is: which one will she choose?
Never romanticizing what it means to be a twenty-something schizophrenic in a world broken by normalcy and half-baked fairytales, Allie Burke's latest novel unites Emily and her world at large spanning from the streets of Russia, to the sheets of her bed, to the idiosyncratic comfort she gets from worlds that don't exist at all.
Woven with angst and darkness, bursting with heartache, Paper Souls tells of the irreparably damaged and broken, and how they survive.
Imagine if dreams were tangible, allowing you to walk through them at will. Reading Paper Souls was like that for me - I felt like I was walking in someone else's dreams, namely those of Emily Colt, the protagonist. Without using quotation marks, the dialogue seemed muted, further lending to the novel's dreamlike quality, and I liked the way it read.
Emily is a character I'll still be thinking about long after the end of this book. She's certainly flawed, but we all are and this made her even more likable to me. It's annoying to read about a protagonist who's made out to be basically perfect. Emily has been in some extremely dangerous situations where, really, she's lucky to still be alive. Anything could have happened to her those times.
I have my B.A. in Psychology, though I'm currently not doing anything with my degree, and I was always fascinated by schizophrenia in my classes. Schizophrenia is easily misunderstood, and the media doesn't help with the general public's confusion surrounding it. This illness is complex and multi-layered, just like Emily. Allie Burke handles this topic with the utmost sensitivity while simultaneously laying bare the illness and what it can do to one's quality of life.
If you've been curious about schizophrenia and want to find out more about it without having to read a textbook, I highly recommend Paper Souls. The way this book is written is exquisite, and I could never hope to come close to adequately describing how beautiful and utterly heartbreaking this story is. You'll have to read it and find out for yourself.
My Rating:
An American novelist, book critic, and magazine editor from Burbank, California, Allie Burke writes books she can't find in the bookstore. Having been recognized as writing a "kickass book that defies the genre it's in", Allie writes with a prose that has been labeled poetic and ethereal.
Her life is a beautiful disaster, flowered with the harrowing existence of inherited eccentricity, a murderous family history, a faithful literature addiction, and the intricate darkness of true love. These are the enchanting experiences that inspire Allie's fairytales.
From some coffee shop in Los Angeles, she is working on her next novel.
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This sounds interest Jennifer. I am glad the writing and story worked so well for you
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kimba! Maybe sometime you'll get to check it out. :)
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