Giraffe People, the third novel by Jill Malone has been winning great reviews.
For Jerry Wheeler, writing on the blog Out in Print, “Malone’s first-person prose captures the tumult of fifteen with a precise clarity that puts us right inside Cole’s heart. Careening whipcrack from triumph to disaster and back again, this is action-filled writing that pauses briefly to consider and then is off on the next adventure or the new experience—dangerous stories told with lethal accuracy. Setting is irrelevant. It’s as breathless as you remember adolescence being.
And speaking of how you remember adolescence, stick around for the final three paragraphs in which Malone manage to recast everything you just read. It’s an unexpected finish; one might even call it a fearless move, but Malone is obviously a writer who loves to take changes.
I can hardly wait to see where she goes next.” Click for the full review.
For Lesbian.com, Bett Norris wrote, “This is not just a luminescent work, it is a transcendent and transformative one. Jill Malone finds and plays the desperate times of the teenaged years like an old Gibson. The reader is instantly, effortlessly, back in those halls of high school, the auditoriums and locker rooms and gyms, the whispered conversations in the library, solving math problems on the phone, sneaking out late at night, wondering, always wondering, if you have gone too far this time, or not far enough.”
“Malone continues to delight with each new book. Her writing reveals a sure, deft skill at the subtleties and ever-changing emotions of characters as they grow and progress.”
“Malone is the real thing, a novelist of great touch and tone, like a fine musician, the kind who play because they love the music and look up at the end of a song, surprised to find an audience.
Grady Harp said: “In Cole Peters fresh author Jill Malone has created a female version of Holden Caulfield only more complex and on many ways more memorable. . . . this is a gentle window into the agonies and ecstasies of discovering the true self . . . a very well written novel by a very promising writer.”
Amos Lassen was also generous with his praise: “This is the first book I have read by Jill Malone and she is a wonderful storyteller. Her writing is clear and precise and she knows how to get to the emotions of her readers. Her words are the definitions of feelings. We not only read about Cole, we feel what she feels (and I must admit that this was very strange for myself as a male reader).” Click for the full review.
