We Ride Upon Sticks

[cornerofmadness]

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


It hurts to rate this so low. Usually I'd bail on something before this but I was reading it for a challenge and I kept thinking I'll get into it. 80s nostalgia, girl power, magic, all of this is in my wheelhouse. I just couldn't get past the things bothering me.

For one, it has a strange choice in narration. It's like someone doing a voice over...for the entire book. Which of the girls is this? We don't know. And then it breaks that narrative by including points of view that they should have no way of knowing (like the thoughts of one of the girl's father's for example) It keeps the reader at a distance.

But for me the killer was how amazingly overwritten this whole thing is. First we have the weird quirk of almost always referring to every character by full name every time (Mel and Little Smitty being exceptions) And everything is so over described it's dense and wearying to wade through. Tell me they dropped their dufflebags, no need to tell me everything that's in them unless it's important later. Everything is described at least three times in a row so if the narrator wants to say something is hot as a summer's day, add in at least two other analogies more often than not.

By fifty pages in we know they're wearing a strip of blue sweat sock on their arms, no need to bring it up every other paragraph. Ditto Jen and her 'claw', her overly teased up 80s bangs. We get it. No need to make it its own character in the book. By the time we really got into the magic, I was fatigued by the prose and no longer cared.



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