A review by mdpenguin
Smoketown by Tenea D. Johnson

3.0

This was a little better than ok. The story is good, the structure of the story-telling was good, but the writing itself -- the way the words worked together on me as a reader -- was weak. The story has a dreamy, magical element to it in terms of the actual facts of the story but that dreamy magic never found its way into the author's language. There were parts that I felt could have been fleshed out more -- easily about 100 more pages worth of material -- but I found that I didn't really want to read what the author would have written if she had done so. The ending is decent though I can't say that I liked the epilogue chapters terribly much. My feeling after the very last chapter,

Spoiler

with the encounter with Peru that doesn't really seem to be saying anything about anything in the book up to that point

, almost lead me to give this 2 stars but the story really was good enough that the even the weak language and the not-terribly-fulfilling epilogue didn't really warrant the demotion.