![]() ![]() None of this would be of any interest were the text itself mediocre. But the effect is certainly novel, and arrestingly alienating. I tried reading it on a train and felt sick. Thanks to all this revolving, it is perhaps the first book deliberately engineered to make the reader feel as though he is swirling down a plughole and then - as the stories cross in the middle and you start reading back the way you came, only now the other way up - swirling up out of another plughole in a parallel dimension. (Why do "o"s get special treatment? Well, they are revolutions, perhaps.) Helpfully, there are also two bookmarks: one green, one yellow. Lest you forget which narrator you are reading, they are colour-coded: each letter "o" in Sam's text is printed in green, since Sam has "Green Eyes with flecks of Gold" Hailey has "Gold Eyes with flecks of Green", so her "o"s are sort of sepia. The blurb advises that one should read eight pages of Sam, and then eight pages of Hailey, which requires turning the book over, since Hailey's story is printed upside-down and from the back of the book to the front. ![]() ![]() It is in fact two epic narrative poems, written by American 16-year-olds Sam and Hailey, who take turns telling the story of their star-crossed love affair. The first misdirection occurs on the dustjacket, where the book is described as "a novel". ![]()
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