eVa into dream. Photographer Beata Cervin, who is based in Stockholm, Sweden, takes an ethereal approach to her body of work labeled Magic.
The light and airy aesthetic has the appeal of a sun-soaked fairy tale—bright and dreamy. There's a girlish charm about her photos that seems to not only refresh one's senses but captivate one's imagination. Rather than taking her photography into the depths of the land of the surreal, where there is no sense of direction and nothing is easily translated, Cervin adds hints of oddities, often in the form of light and gravity-defiance.
The inexplicable levitating bodies that appear in the photographer's portfolio seem to weightlessly float in the air. It's as though time stands still for this graceful young woman. There are also beautiful and, appropriately, magical elements incorporated into these images that enhance the fantasy Cervin visually writes. Beata Cervin websiteBeata Cervin on Flickr via [farewell kingdom] Girl glass feet (Gutiérrez) The girl with glass feet (NYT) The girl with glass feet (Washington post) Henry Holt. 287 pp. $24 Americans force-fed Disney candyfloss from childhood forget how dark fairy tales can be.
Blood streams from the toes of would-be brides who try to cram their feet into Cinderella's glass slipper. Snow White's stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid trades her finned tail for human feet and thereafter feels as though she walks on razor-sharp blades. And what's with all the feet? Like those novels, Shaw's is set in an imaginary place that evokes both our mundane world and a far stranger one that exists, half-hidden, within its familiar woods and shops and chicken coops.
Eons ago, a volcanic eruption created St. Ida, a tourist to St. Only when Ida returns home to the mainland does she make another bizarre, less benign discovery: a sliver of crystal embedded in her foot. Desperate for a cure, she returns to the island in search of Fuwa.
Girl glass feet (ali shaw) The girl with glass feet (Reading Matters) Fiction - paperback; Atlantic Books; 295 pages; 2009.
Ali Shaw's debut novel The Girl With Glass Feet is set on a fictional wind-swept island, St Hauda, where strange and unusual events take place. And there is no more strange and unusual event than having your feet turn into glass, which is what happens to the book's central character, Ida MacLaird, who returns to the island in search of a cure. Here she meets Midas Crook, a painfully shy young man, who distances himself from the rest of the world by observing it through the lens of a camera. Midas is emotionally damaged through no fault of his own: his parent's had a troubled marriage, which ended in his father's suicide, while his eccentric mother turned into a recluse. The two develop a close friendship, which slowly morphs into love. The girl with glass feet (Suciu review) Is a book that could easily have escaped my attention without its being mentioned on Niall Harrison's Torque Control blog both in his intended 2010 reads and in the BSFA novel nominations post.
Once I found out about it, luckily exactly when the US edition came out last week, a quick read of the excerpt linked above from Amazon made me get it on the spot and I really loved it to the end. FORMAT/CLASSIFICATION: "The Girl with Glass Feet" stands at about 300 pages and follows mostly the two main protagonists' POVs: the girl of title, exuberant, lively, former competition diver Ida MacLaird and strange, introvert, photographer/flower seller Midas Crook, though there are interludes from several other important characters from the misfit/weirdos cast of the novel.
Girl glass feet. The girl with glass feet (HugeD) The girl with glass feet (Strange Horizons) 23 September 2009 On the edge of somewhere we almost know lies the archipelago of St Hauda's Land, a scatter of islands wrapped about by their own hazy reality.
Ida MacLaird has returned to them in search of an answer to a mystery. Midas Crook was born and bred on them and remains bound by their secrets and silences. Their stories make for a novel of uncertainties and strange moments of illumination, of loss and confusion and hopeless loves, of missed chances and memories soured by time. Midas takes photographs to define and explain a world he does not understand and rather fears. This is not an easy book, nor is it a comfortable one, though it is rather beautiful.
Tourists would never be attracted . . . by the fishery guildhall at Gurmton, whose painted ceiling of seamen and sea creatures, all depicted with underwhelming skill in the muted colours of the ocean, was optimistically compared to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There are things that irritated me.
Girl glass feet (alishaw) The girl with glass feet (alishaw) 'Fantastically imagined...
Only a heart of glass would be unmoved.' - New York Times Book Review. The girl with glass feet (Guardian)