Mockingbird

Sean Stewart

What a delight to have discovered Sean Stewart. In the novel I just finished, he takes a little bit of voodoo, a whole lot of Texas, great heaping doses of a mother raising two young girls while fighting the moments in her life when she's taken over by the Riders. The Riders are small dolls kept in a chifforobe and named appropriately, The Widow, Mr. Copper, Little Girl Lost, and Sugar. All different personalities which collide together in one person and affecting all who come through the lives of the person they "own". Sean Stewart handles this entire tableau with great sensitivity and frankness and he never leaves his reader alone, or wishing to be other places. There is a great sense of balance to this novel, it's never quite fantasy, or magic realism, or just pure fiction, it's a magical and well scaled blend of all. He colors this novel with little treasures like this description of a Texas night;

...By day the Houston summer is unbearable, but a July night in Texas is surely one of God's gifts to the world, a mysterious, velvety blackness, softer than a whispered promise, so rich and luxuriant you can almost feel it brush against your skin like the flesh of unseen flowers.

I definitely wish to read more of him and will be adding other novels of his to my TBR stack.