Unfortunately it also sounded great when I read 'Shadow of the Wind' and 'Kings of Infinite Space' on your recommendation. Both of which turned out to be very mediocre books. The clincher was when you wrote a gushing review of 'The Ruins', which turned out to be the worse piece of fiction I'd read in fifteen years.

I think you are my 'bizarro' reviewer. If you give it a good review I can be fairly assured that I won't like the book.

Rash is the real deal, an excellent poet and short story writer who has written a great novel (One Foot in Eden) and two very good ones (Saints at the River and The World Made Straight) before this one. Serena, with its grand and sometimes bizarre gestures (the eagle, the one-handed henchman), is both greater and lesser than One Foot in Eden (though it, to be sure, also had a witch of its very own). The difference is that the earlier novel is quiet, assured, and respectful of its audience's feelings, whereas Serena is balls-to-the-wall operatic from page 1.

He's the best writer working in and about the mountain South today, a geography I hate specifying since it will, in some readers' minds, limit his abilities and aspirations, as well putting him into a category they needn't bother with. So let's change that to: One of the five best novelists working today.

If this novel is as tasty as the reviewer reports, then so be its ascendance. If this reviewer is 'bizarro,' as one writer has evidenced, then so be its eventual demise.

The Art of Reviewing must be described here - for the purpose of steering otherwise friendly fire away from the book(s). The components of competent literary evaluation and comment are:

o Knowledge of the work, including the author's craft pedigree

o Description of the style and elements so encoiled sufficient to know the 'writing predicate' - its reason for existence

o Statement of opinion and reasons therefore, plus comparisons to other works that bring understanding about its intent

o Concluding commentary that ascribes the value thereto

These are not difficult items to address, but they are usually essential to good review writing.

With no more info, I'll read the book based upon #2's blessing.

All indigenous beavers in NC were wiped out more than a hundred years ago. After that a program to transplant beavers from elsewhere was started. Today all beavers are non - indigenous.

Serena is hardly the first female standing in for pure id in literature..but this review reminded me rather forcibly of a possibly even more frightening female, the evil force-of-nature in John D. MacDonald's brilliant noir picaresque *The Last One Left.* It's out of print now, but includes at its center a woman who'd be right at home in one of Kraft-Ebbing's tomes.

Worth your time to find and read, it's one of MacDonald's better efforts.

On the subject of women as ID it's worth remembering the Marquis de Sade's heroine Juliette and all the libertine superwomen he populated his books with. If you don't feel like reading his books (and the endless sex is really boring, once the shock wears off you're waiting for the plot to start again) Angela Carter's The Sadean Women is an entertaining look at them from a post-modern feminist perspective. It's more fun than I've made it sound.

Sounds like Rash has gone back to the well with this one.