(NP) Kavalier and Clay

[Michael Bailey]

not bad, not bad at all...

"For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs,
reading *Betty and Veronica*, the icy ball had melted away without him
even noticing.  *That* was magic - not the apparent magic of the
silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold brute trickery of the escape
artist, but the genuine magic of art.  It was a mark of how fucked-up
and broken was the world - the reality - that had swallowed his home
and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull
off, should remain so universally despised."

-- 
--
"Frenesi's eyes, even on the aging ECO stock, took over the frame, a
defiance of blue unfadable."