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Title: terrific beauty.
Review: without ranking among any of my favorites, this book stuck in my memory anyhow, just with napoli's incomparable way of invoking the most appropriately perfect and beautiful images. it's for that if nothing else that i marvel at this book. taken simply as a story, "the magic circle" is just that--simple. clear cut, clear point, even the twist arrives with the sharpest warning. but napoli's language turns into heavy gold, thickly incrusted with jewel-images of the raw beauty of pinecones, mica sheets, a daughter, wild gorse. the language is perfect, absolutely. too strong and potent to be wistfully "lyrical" it manages at the same time to stay grounded without by not becoming overly sentimental, so that when the old woman tells of her loss, more bitter than self-pitying, it is all the more tragic. the writing makes the book itself as beautiful, definitely worth reading.
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