"Daniel Strasel’s
THE TERRORS OF WONDER is perhaps one of the quirkiest
books
I’ve encountered in this year’s contest, and certainly
one of the most original.
A mere summary of
the plot (someone is trying to steal a young heiress’s
inheritance) doesn’t
do justice to the book’s odd structure: it’s made up
of narrative, graphs, charts, footnotes, and
appendices.
All of this helps
to lend the book a sense of verisimilitude—we feel as
though we’re reading
a collection of documents about an actual event.
Strasel calls the book a tragicomedy, and it in fact
is:
there’s a great deal of humor in the book, but it’s
about rather a serious topic.
Much of the writing
is quite good,
and the verve of the book comes from its structural
oddities.
Strasel is to be
applauded for the innovation of his work, and the
sheer
imaginative guts and playfulness with which he’s
infused his book. "
-
Judge, 25th Annual Writer’s Digest
Self-Published Book Awards