Shane Jones' Light Boxes

i read this yesterday in a couple of hours. it's 167 pages, a squat book with much white space, and a good textual design that reminds me of Barthelme's Snow White. though it's 167 pages, it's probably around 20 K words. the story is a fantasy/fairy-tale type thing, though that doesn't really do it justice. it's a dark fairy-tale, and the imagination on each page is both striking and subtle. the prose is clear, precise, and rarely goes for more than it can acheive. though on some occassions, i did wonder why some lines weren't cut. some things, dialogue especially, felt out of place or forced or something - in general, these were small things, easy to let slide. the story is about February, that grey and gloomfilled month, which has descended on a particular town for over year. children have disappeared. flight is no longer possible. and sunlight, like warmth, is gone. the townspeople decide to wage war against February. they are led by Thaddeous and Selah and their daughter, Bianca. what unravels is a not a fight against cold, but a struggle against sadness and loss. there's even a fun metafictive element. i won't reveal more. i really liked the book. it's moving, sometimes sad, sometimes dark, but possibly the thing i liked most about the book was its warmness. the warmness i think comes from two things: the author's imaginative world is so complete unto itself that it feels nice to live inside that world for a short time; the second thing is that the characters, while only roughly sketched in that fairy tale way, are characters you want to see win. even the dark character, the bringer of sadness, February himself, you feel sympathy for. and of course, in the end, Light Boxes has nothing to do with a fairy tale world.