Totally not the story I thought I was reading when I started, and very nifty because and in spite of that. Lots of fun. ( )

A story about growing from childhood into adulthood. Published in 1982 as McKillip’s “first book for adults”, I can see why this is now out-of-print. It is strange, even by McKillip’s standards for strangeness. In merging the mundane with the magical, the mythical, it attempts something rather interesting and thoughtful, but it isn’t quite successful.

However, the descriptions of places are wonderfully vivid, the narrator’s emotions are conveyed with intensity, and there were moments that felt like catching a fleeting glimpse of myself of a mirror. I didn’t always like it, but I’m glad I got to read it all the same.

We lived in a small town surrounded by a patchwork of fields. England seemed a placid country. Its skies were open; it had queens and no boars. It was incredibly old. In the graveyard of the church across the street from our house lay four-hundred-year-old bones. The church and our house were even older than that. It was there that I realised that time didn’t move in a straight line; it was a crooked river, constantly twisting back toward itself, pooling here and there into memory. I could walk down a street and see tumbled piles of bricks that had once been houses destroyed in a war not twenty years before. Then the street itself would change, the past seeping up out of the ground in the shape of cobblestones worn smooth by centuries. [...] Even its writers were old -- Kipling, Stevenson, Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer -- stretching back into a past with no written language, when stories melted in and out of life the way time shifted along a street, until the lines between present and past, real and unreal, became blurred and dangerously unimportant. ( )

McKillip is one of my favorite authors - but if she had asked me (which, obviously, she wouldn't have) - I would have counseled her to NOT publish this book. It's not that it's badly written - it's that it's extremely obviously autobiographical, and does not portray the author in a flattering light. Reading it, I kept thinking "I don't need to know this!"
Basically, it's about how she had serious mental/social problems as a child and teenager, grew up scared of/attracted to men, and stayed a virgin for a ridiculously long time, as well as being ridiculously unsophisticated. This is couched in a semi-fantasy/metaphorical concept of being haunted by a "stag-man" who is a dream lover, but it's mostly not a fantasy.
I don't know. Some things don't need to be revealed/confessed to the world. ( )