Renee Macalino Rutledge

Beautifully written and reminiscent, at times, of the prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but even accounting for the magic in its pages, Rutledge's story lacks some of the whimsy (for want of a better word) of Garcia Marquez. Fans of magical realism and re-framed folktales like Patrick Ness's The Crane Wife should find a lot to love here.

And, let's be honest: While I can appreciate the beauty of the prose and the ambiguous nature of the story, I am not really the right reader for this book. It took me three days to finish its scant 235 pages. This is another case of it not being the book's fault, but mine as a reader. This just wasn't "my thing".
… (lisätietoja)

I received a free advance copy of this book through Netgalley and Forest Avenue Press in return for an honest reveiw.

During a time of grief Manolo Lualhati stumbles upon seven sisters bathing in the moonlit river. As he watches six of them don beautiful white wings and fly away while the seventh lingers in the waters. Struck by her beauty he hides her wings and they are soon married. But Manolo feels guilty and unworthy and these feelings are bound up with the fear that his beautiful wife will one day rediscover her wings and leave him bereft and so he becomes suspicious, following Tala in disguise and trying to penetrate her secrets. At the same time Tala worries that Manolo’s love is fleeting and possessive and sets out to test his trust by placing a locked box in their home, the key in the lock, and asking her husband to respect the secret within.
Rutledge’s lyrical tale builds on a long tradition of magical realism, dominated by striking voices such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, blending folklore and fairy tales with stories of real lives in order to capture the culture of her world. The Hour of Daydreams explores that liminal space between waking and sleep where dreams bleed into reality and vice versa. So powerful is this effect that their daughter, who has never known her mother, is haunted by bullies who call her mother a witch, a monster, and she has no clear truth with which to parry their cruelty. The story of Manolo and Tala and the uncertainty over how they really met and who they really are interrogates the way that we use dreams and dream-like qualities to obscure darker aspects of life that we would rather not face. Is Tala an otherworldly creature, higher and purer than her husband or is there a darker, all-too-real explanation for their first encounter?
It also asks questions about the difference between reason and superstition and the difficulty we have in fully occupying either world. Manolo is a doctor, prides himself on his ability to find rational causes for illnesses without resorting to folk remedies or supernatural explanations but he also believes that his wife had wings. Despite his rationality Manolo remains haunted by these wings but is he really afraid that they are her means of escape or is he simply terrified that he cannot keep her and uncertain of her love? As Manolo becomes consumed by suspicion and fixates on the secret box Rutledge slowly unpicks the intricacies of the conflicting explanations, using multiple viewpoints to shed light on the ambiguous events.
It’s a beautifully told story and Ruteledge has an eye for a striking image and an ability to really evoke the feel and colour of her setting. There’s a wonderful sense of place, with a real depth of sights and sounds and the magical elements add a flavour of Filipino culture. Unfortunately I didn’t feel her characters as deeply, they were so firmly enmeshed in the uncertainty of their pasts and the space between truth and myth that they never fully emerged, limited to characters in a story being told to their daughter rather than people in their own right, lacking the nuance of real feeling. Even by the end they felt as insubstantial as Tala’s wings.… (lisätietoja)