Shape Shifter

Brightly colored cartoons dropped from the skies, with rude boys and girls dancing their daily daze.

Nope, it's not a book on lycanthropes if you're grazing for the more straight forward mystical transformations. But if you glance at the cover, a montage of carribean blue and sun-baked sand in a fun-funky font, you know that. It is indeed a book of transformations. In pieces. A whole novel following any of the sometimes troubled, always hard luck characters would be too heavy. I'd pass over it. Yet these are digestable slices of life, catching different characters in a moment of realization, transition, change, even before they process it, is precious; see "the Quarrelsome Man". Don't let the cool cover fool you; some of it's quite oppressive; it's not a vacation novel as the cover might hint. It's about living in the slums outside disneyland. Heavily endowed with an awareness of everyday racism and poverty, the book still comes out feeling like a warm sunset. This book does not criticize; it describes and accepts. It's exciting to have this prospective on controversial subject matter without hand-wringing. It makes it more real to the reader because you're not in the shoes of some outraged observer keyed up and trying to tune in to the human condition from leather shoes and air-conditioning. You're in the midst of the day-to-day, where there is nothing to contrast; "The Conversion of Millicent Vernon." There is even a little suspense/horror (more frightening upon rereading) - "You Left the Door Open." And quite poetically, a little bit of science fiction in "The Girl with the Celestial Limb." This collection transmits the reader from the everyday up into the unreal. It's accomplished with such meta ease, that the reader doesn't feel the floor drop out from under.