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Her Fingers (2012)

by Tamara Romero(Favorite Author)

3.97 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1621050661 (ISBN13: 9781621050667)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Eraserhead Press

review 1: Her Fingers is a quiet little Bizarro book. And I loved everything about it. In the Editor’s Note Kevin Shamel says that it is not a fairy tale. And it is not a fairy tale. But it almost is. It has the feel of a fairy tale. It is dark and mystical and beautiful.Her Fingers follows Misadora. She is also called Lex and Ethereal. She is a witch. She is found, unconscious, floating in the Adrenaline River. Her bright red hair, white dress, and metal fingers. She can’t remember anything. The man who finds her, Volatile, hides her in his cabin. Witches are hated, hunted, and he cannot let anyone that he has one in his cabin. Volatile works for the government and he has to hide her from the Pink Swam, a robotic recording device that follows him everywhere.This is a dark world... more, an oppressed state. There are witches, stoned and living in the forest. There are also Bionics, people who replace their body parts with metal, hoping to live forever. And Sleepwalkers and robot doll servants and Treemothers.Tamara Romero has really created a beautiful little book. At only 60 pages, there is a lot going on. This was published as part of the 2012-2013 New Bizarro Author Series, which gives new authors a venue to publish their weird fiction. This is really a great book, and I can’t wait to see what she puts out next.
review 2: According to ancient Yimlan tradition, you need to say your three names at the beginning of an encounter with someone who has saved, or is going to, save your life. With this simple piece of imagined folklore as its base, Tamara Romero weaves an intricate and fragile tale that mixes witches and technology, druidism and drug addiction, bionics and magic in Her Fingers. The book is peppered throughout with little aphorisms like this, bits and pieces of legend from the world of the story. Romero uses the three-names idea to brilliantly set up some wonderfully revealing twists and strangle beautiful storytelling.Chapters alternate between two protagonists: Volatile, a mysterious man hiding in an isolated cabin in the woods with his robotic doll Shades, and Misadora, a young witch who finds herself drug-addled, persecuted by the government, and trying to understand the nature of her scared ring and the tree-bound women who call to her in her lucid moments. As the story progresses, identities are fleshed out and surprises abound, both for the individual characters and for their relationships to one another. This is something that Romero does magnificently, writing relationships that feel vibrant and ever-shifting, dreamlike and engaging.The lovingly crafted relationships are the most engaging thing about Her Fingers. The plot is enjoyable, and follows a well-crafted arc with few diversions from the main storyline, however it is those moments where we see characters interact that truly shine. Without ruining anything, there is a moment toward the end of the book in which we get to see a flashback through the eyes of Misadora where we are witness to the moment she lost a very important ring. We are led along without knowing the origin of this loss for most of the book, and then suddenly everything is revealed. It's not the reveal of the "how" though, so much as the "whom." We are shown wanton cruelty, beautiful kindness and everything in between in these simple interactions, and what's better, this all becomes yet another setup for more puzzled solved only a few pages later. Her Fingers is a very short book, but there is a ton of magic packed between the pages.Her Fingers was written in Spanish, initially, and translated by the author for its publication in English. Some of the sentences seem to hold odd word choices or construction, possibly due to the translation process. That said, however, the poesy of the language and the specificity with which Romero chose each word rings with a melody that is unlike most other debut books. The concepts are spelled out with carefully chosen language that just sings. Consider the way the prostitution of witches is described, an ugly concept made beautiful by prose: "And many a man would pay extra to lay with a witch, watching her colored hair become wild, since at night a witch has not only a naked body, but a naked condition. In those chambers converged heaven and hell, ecstasy and darkness." A magical, tragic and personal tale of the strange and wonderful worth picking up for anyone who likes their genre tropes mixed, blended, and served with a side of mist and fog. less

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