Customer Reviews

Filter House

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Filter House is the secret best book of the Summer. It has no business being left in the warehouse when you could buy it read, give it to your best friend, or read to your children. These are a selection of entertaining and complex stories, filled with fantasy, love, and discovery. This is definitely a book club and reading group book! Shawl wrote of many things, giving you something to talk about.

The professional reviewers have focused on "Wallamellon" with reason. It is completely charming; full of twists and turns. "At the Huts of Ajala," "Good Boy," "Shiomah's Land," and all the rest of the stories pull you into the story, whisking you away to a new land and a new way of looking at the world. When I mention one story, I think of another that is fabulous, too. My personal favorite is "The Beads of Ku." It should become a classic. This book is suitable for young adult readers.

Call Nisi Shawl's stories curvy fiction, call them slipstream, call them speculative--they're all grounded in experience. In Shawl's stories, calling upon an African goddess is no more speculative than hailing a taxi. In Shawl's realities, imagination is a force to be reckoned with and the universe is teeming with life and spirit and desire.

"Filter House" is aptly named for the structure a minuscule sea creature secretes around itself and that filters the sea for the creature's food. Food, dwelling, the implied hearth and heart that is fed--all these describe Shawl's stories. Her characters are closely observed, and gain quick traction in the friction of the real.

The real, here, is animated, alive, and Shawl's sentences weave a rhythm that gives voice to (secret?) desires--for divine intervention, for allies and challengers in rocks and trees, for love and imagination to be made simple and practical. Her stories' trajectories are wonderfully entertaining but her sentences are magical. With dialog and observation, Shawl manages to frequently prick through the veil between reader and writer, bringing her characters alive in a delightfully synchronous world.