The Between

Tananarive Due
The Between Cover

The Between

Leslie D
3/1/2013
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"Hilton was seven when his grandmother died, and it was a bad time. But it was worse when she died again." From that very lovely opening, Tananarive Due crafts a pulse-thrumming tale of a man haunted by a "sinister fear" (45). The rhythmic quality of the writing draws Hilton's consciousness from the page and his own increasingly confused sense of reality becomes the reader's own. Italicized moments seep into the text between paragraphs, between "lucid" moments, into sentence ends. Some stretches exchange italics for the non-dreaming, non-subconscious spaces of non-stressed print. Are we experiencing mental illness or magical realism, or some semblance of both in that the human perceptions of reality holds a blurring, and moments of between, of dreaming…

In the Prologue, Due describes a young Hilton's slip beneath the surface of the ocean, a teasing current pulling at his ankles, but soon, the playful becomes gripping as it seizes him in earnest (6), and such is the experience of the novel. The story begins as a delightful tinge of uncertainty only to smoothly shift in a breathless turning pages. The Between begs for some deeper cultural reads...and for a mature audience who understand the complicated emotions and relationships, as well as a deeper understanding of what would cause a man to fracture and to fight.

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