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Title: poorly crafted, poorly realized
Review: I was most bothered by the poor characterizations in Cavedweller. Countless times the characters turned themselves out in the most unlikely ways with no motivation or tension to explain this. I suspect Allison is ill-suited for the omniscient voice. Her incessant narrative mind-reading drove me up a tree--although this artifice was surely necessary to explain the characters' eternally bewildering behaviour. I thought the beginning was quite compelling, however, and it wasn't until I was halfway through the book before by disbelief could be suspended no more. The relatively strong caving sequences leant the second half of the book some cohesion but came too late to save the novel as a whole for this reader. The story takes place in a rural (or suburban? I couldn't tell) Georgia town called "Cayro". I was telling this to a friend and his immediate response was "Like the syrup?" which I found an inscrutably apt perception.
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