Puss Reboots: Blog: September 2010: Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance

Recent posts

Reviews
The Adventures of the Hotsy Totsy by Clive Cussler
Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
As Long as He Needs Me by Mary Verdick
Bone: The Dragonslayer by Jeff Smith
Bone: Old Man's Cave by Jeff Smith
Bone: Rock Jaw by Jeff Smith
Cat and Canary by Michael Foreman
Celestine, Drama Queen by Penny Ives
Elena's Serenade by Campbell Geeslin
Gentleman Takes a Chance by Sarah A. Hoyt
Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance by Paul Park
Hate That Cat by Sharon Creech
Halloween Town by Lucius Shepard
Iris by Nancy Springer
Great Joy by Kate DiCamillo
Kiss My Math by Danica McKelar
The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King
The Last Ember by Daniel Levin
The Magic Gourd by Baba Wagué Diakité
Monster Motel by Douglas Florian
Mr. Darcy Vampyre by Amanda Grange
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
The Princess Test by Gail Carson Levine
Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder
The Revolutionary Paul Revere by Joel Miller
The Talking Baby by Jeremy and Karina Sweet
Thanksgiving on Thursday (Magic Tree House #27) by Mary Pope Osborne
Treehorn's Wish by Florence Parry Heide

Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance: 09/08/10

"Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance" is the novella from the January / February 2010 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's a spiraling tale of a meeting out in the woods, one that's doomed to repeat itself.

I normally like metafiction. I've written about it before on this blog. I read "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance" by Paul Park with high expectations. I could see where it was going but I never really clicked with it.

The problem for me was the constant starting and stopping of the story. In that regard it reminds me of another metafiction that didn't work for me, Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer. There was so much emphasis on the telling of the story that the cool circular plot gets pushed aside.