Ali Shaw - The Girl With Glass Feet

Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Magical winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts who has only visited the islands once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.

Comment: This book promised a magical story according to some critics.
I was expecting a love story but the book really focuses more on the writing instead of the romance the blurb sems to highlight.
Ida's feet are turning into glass and she goes back to the island where she believes everyhting started, In there, she meets Midas, a shy guy who slowly becomes important to her and they fall in love.
While looking for a cure to her problem, they develop a sweet relationship with mutual confessions and the reader gets to see more of their pasts as well as their parents' history. Like I said the focus ins't the romance but the story itself, and I must say the language used is gorgeous, the author knows his english and brings poetry to his prose, because things appear so much richer than they are because of that. I think the writing itself is the author's strongest point.
Ida and Midas spend some time with another man, the one Ida thinks will have the cure for her and together they find out new things about the past, things that will be the solution to her mysterious condition.

I finished the book with a sense of "it could be better". I mean, the book isn't bad per se, but the feeling I got in the end....strange. I won't tell spoilers, but I have to say i did not expect that wnding. I imagined it would be so, but not like that, which was a surprise. So surprised I was, but not completely.
The book has magical beings and magical things happening. It was interesting to see the author's iamgination in those small details.

I always had the idea serious newspapers won't write critics to the so called "common romances", things that seem to follow a formula whether it's an idea of the author of the publisher's line. Anyway, this story is fresh work of art but isn't a romance, so I gues it's not such a surprise newspapers would comment on it. However, if someone is trying to be dazzled by a love story I think they might be disappointed. My advice? Don't have expectations if you're going to read the book. Jut let yourself be surprised and perhaps the end will make more sense then.