num_pages: 200
description: City of Bones, River of Blood is the story of a novel that writes itself. The narrator, as presented, is an inexperienced teenage police reporter on a small town newspaper in Michigan in the 1950s. In this town, a child has been raped and murdered by an ex-convict. The main plot concerns the hunt for the murderer. But the book is also about the creation of the artist who writes the book. When the naïve reporter begins her book, she knows her legal name, her given name, but she doesn't know the name of this `thing' within her, this great moving `thing' that isn't bounded by gravity, time or space - the great silver fish that she has seen once in a dream. It is by writing the book that the artist has come into creation. In this sense, City of Bones, River of Blood is a novel of initiation, a Romansbildung. It is not until the young reporter gets almost to the end of her story that she is able to name herself as Evita Blossom - she who is born `out of life.' Likewise, although the narrator has initially named her town `Cripplecreek' she comes to realize that the town is not - cannot beso unconscious of its rapacity as it pretends to be - that the true name of the town she had passed off as merely `Cripplecreek', is, instead, the City of Bones, River of Blood. The story is told in segments, in the same way that memory is held in the mind -not by chronology, but by association. Thus the story builds, layer by layer toward the culminating event -the long-awaited, so-called `gala' opening of a new motel in the town of Cripplecreek. Here in the hot sun, detectives in Hawaiian shirts and fedoras mix too casually with the townspeople, who do not know that the ex-con is being questioned inside the motel because police are attempting to keep him alive until they can get him back to prison -where the prisoners will undoubtedly kill him. So while kids are jumping and screaming for lost balloons and the chance to ride the sky -free!in the rented helicopter -while under the hot September sun a naked ice statue of Venus melts into the potato salad -the murderer, weeping, confesses to the murder of a child - and asks pathetically why Fate is mocking him. According to the author, Bones would never have been written, except that every woman she has known has had a share in this same story. Darby Mitchell is a professor of English at a small college in the upper peninsula of Michigan. She has won numerous university prizes for creative writing. City of Bones, River of Blood is her fifth published book. Ingrid Cline, a fine and original Rumanian artist newly emigrated to the U.S., has also earned professional recognition for her work. City of Bones is their first collaboration.
title: City of Bones, River of Blood
titlecomplete: City of Bones, River of Blood
ratings_count: 1
publisher: Castle Publishing