{"id":870,"date":"2008-05-24T16:33:34","date_gmt":"2008-05-24T16:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/wordpress\/?p=870"},"modified":"2011-10-29T13:43:25","modified_gmt":"2011-10-29T18:43:25","slug":"fiction_the_mon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2008\/05\/fiction_the_mon.html","title":{"rendered":"Fiction: The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bought this one in an airport due at least partly to its paper-cut-out looking cover (Yo, Chicken, you would LOVE it, have you seen it????) and its Stephen King blurb.<\/p>\n<p>Definitely fits into that &#8220;damaged girl comes home, solves mystery&#8221; genre (like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2006\/11\/currently_recom.html\">Sharp Objects<\/a> but a little less dark).<\/p>\n<p>I have some misgivings: some of the characters made me a little crazy; I&#8217;m not sure the historical stuff ever really found its way IN to the story \/ didn&#8217;t quite coalesce; and there&#8217;s at least one character who I, and I would assume many readers feel this way, still have outstanding concerns about as the book ends.<\/p>\n<p>But I liked the tone, I liked the focus on academia, the almost, but not quite, high-browed literariness of it.  And I loved the contrast between the unmonstrousness of the actual monster and the metaphoricness of the Monsters of the title.  Some stuff really well done.  Very textured and tactile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bought this one in an airport due at least partly to its paper-cut-out looking cover (Yo, Chicken, you would LOVE it, have you seen it????) and its Stephen King blurb. Definitely fits into that &#8220;damaged girl comes home, solves mystery&#8221; &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2008\/05\/fiction_the_mon.html\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-readin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2187,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions\/2187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}