Mockingbird

My favorite genre is magic realism. I love reading and writing about how life would be if our world got blended with fantastical things. This story, reads very much like a diary from the blender. It is the story of Tori and what happens when her mother leaves her a voodoun legacy, debt and how she deals with bringing her life together. She must reconcile her love/hate relationship with the magicks, god and adapt to her own abilities while being pregnant. As a first novel, and written from a female perspective from a male author, Stewart does a good job of painting scenes and throwing the reader into his world where magic and reality collide. I was impressed with his ability to pull off writing from the point of view of a pregnant 30-something woman who's terrified and exicted to lead a life without her mother or the dark legacy that she left her. This novel has tight writing and some witty dialog (not to mention some interesting situations) and is a quick and fun read. It fits into my goals by being, yet another fiction book.