Skip to main content

The House of Rust

 


What a bizarre little story. When I say bizarre, I mean that mostly in a good way. The House of Rust  by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a fantasy that takes place in and around Mombasa, and out to sea in a very strange sea. Our main character is Aisha, a girl who does not fit into the mold that everyone keeps trying to place her. When her father is lost at sea, she takes it upon herself to go out and bring him back (with the help of a talking cat).

There be monsters here.

Yes, Aisha finds monsters at sea. Monsters that she has to either outsmart or be eaten by. And on land it turns out the world is far more complicated than she could have imagined. It is not just cats who can understand her. Many animals can, though they pretend not to. It is an interwoven tapestry of a story that is filled with wonder. But at times the story takes a twist that leaves me puzzled.

The world is just too strange and wonderful for Aisha to possibly settle down. She has seen a glimpse of something bigger, and she wants it.  She knows that she does not want a traditional life. There is a nice boy that likes her, potential husband material. Grandmother is thrilled. Aisha is not. Her grandmother has been the dominant force in Aisha’s life, and Aisha genuinely loves and respects her, but when Aisha’s eyes are opened to a new world, we know that a choice will have to be made.

I really liked the first half of the House of Rust. It is filled with a magical adventure. It is weird and creepy and thought provoking. The second half doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the first half. Perhaps that is my fault. The book did not go where I wanted it to go. Authors are not obliged to go where I want them to go. My personal preference would have been for a better tie-in to the adventure from the first half. But to each their own.

I will say that The House of Rust is well written with compelling characters. If you are looking for something different in the fantasy realm, this is very different.

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...
1 comment
Read more

Roy Batty Figures it out

  This is written with the assumption that the reader has seen the film Blade Runner . If you haven’t, you may not get much out of it. In one of the last scenes in Blade Runner , the killer android Roy Batty, who holds Deckard’s life in his hands, has a remarkable speech: “I've seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die.” I am told that the speech that was written was not working very well, and Rutger Hauer was told to just improvise something. Wow. He nailed it. At this point in the film Roy Batty has been the villain throughout. We have been rooting for Deckard (Harrison Ford) to take him out, but it is not going well, and it seems like Batty is about to kill him. At the last second, Roy Batty pulls Deckard up, to keep him from falling to his death. Then he delivers this...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more