Name: The Girl with Glass Feet
ISBN: 9781843549185

Ali Shaw

A mysterious and frightening alchemical metamorphosis has befallen Ida Maclaird - she is slowly turning into glass, from the feet up. She returns to St Hauda's Land, where she believes the glass first took hold, 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, and they begin to fall in love...What they need most is time - and 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 gripping first novel, a love story to treasure.

The Girl with Glass Feet

Kirsten Simkiss

** spoiler alert **
           I really just did not like this book at all.

The characters are unrealistic and not easy to relate to. The main cast of characters are three men and one woman. The female character, Ida, is slowly but surely turning to glass. Rather than going immediately to an actual doctor, she decides to backtrack to this little island where she was afflicted and this one guy, Henry (another of the main characters), mentioned it once and she brushed it off as him being drunk before he literally ran away from her. When she goes back to find him, she learns that he's a complete recluse and that no one actually knows him.

Henry has no redeeming qualities, honestly. He loves science and shut himself away from the world for no real discernible reason other than to protect his moth-winged bulls, which for most of the story I had assumed were some kind of dragon fly. Apparently not - I think they're actually insect sized cows with moth wings. Henry literally has no point in this book other than to tell Ida that there's no cure and that she is very definitely going to turn to glass. Ida's a breath of fresh air, but kind of a moron. Seriously, amputate your feet. If you had just amputated your already crystalline feet, you might have lived. But no, you had to try jellyfish jam alternate torture medicine. Real smart.

In the process of looking for him, she runs into Midas Crook (the main love interest for Ida), who is a self-important, hollow, and utterly boring hipster sort of character. He lies to Ida and tells her he doesn't know Henry. Midas is also a useless human being. He was raised by a family where love was solely lacking and lives in the shadow of his intelligent father who killed himself by lighting himself and all his writings on fire in a boat while his son watched from the shoreline. Obviously, this is quite traumatic. But rather than learning from it, Midas convinces himself that he has no choice but to become his father because that's how genetics work but also grows up hating his father and the parts of his father that Midas sees in himself. Midas does very little in the way of growing as a character, honestly. He opens up a little bit by the very end, but only because loss of someone he loves occurs (Ida) and from bullying by Ida and his best friend, Gustav. Gustav literally beats his sensitivity to touch out of him. He fears human contact and Gustav just beats him out of it. I may not be a psychologist, but I will tell you right now that that is not how you handle it.

Meanwhile, as she looks for Henry, Ida is staying with Carl, an "uncle" figure who knew her mother. This would be all well and good if he weren't a horrifyingly creepy and predatory man who's still in love with Ida's dead mother. Chapter 7 particularly bothered the hell out of me, where Carl's internal monologue essentially says that he's alright with substituting Ida for her mother. He also says that he had strongly considered digging up her mother's dead body but didn't for fear of defiling it. Needless to say, Carl is a creep. Later in the book, he actually tries to rape her and then scrambles off to later freeze to death in the woods. (Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.)

I think the biggest weakness of the book is that all the characters of the same gender are the same. All the women are fragile flowers that can't be fixed and are either dead or dying (spiritually as well as physically for some) and all the men are useless, unemotional, and boring people who have sequestered themselves away from actually living life. Everyone is so ridiculously alone. Even through the course of the book, Ida and Midas never really have much chemistry. Ida likes Midas, but he's determined for 90% of the story to wallow in his loneliness with his camera.

TLDR: If she had just amputated her legs and gone to an actual doctor, Ida might have lived and she might have had a more interesting love interest. I don't recommend this book to anyone.

Renee Blankenship

I enjoyed this story and the characters in it, but I was a bit disappointed with the ending. I suppose I had a bit of a naive outlook regarding the outcome, but all in all a quite magical story about love and loss. I really felt like I was rooting for both of the main characters throughout the story. It was also a fairly quick read too.

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Young lovers Ida Maclaird and Midas Crook seek a cure for a magical ailment on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda's Land

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