The ... story of one man's ... odyssey through an enchanted world to find his wife, who has disappeared after having seemingly committed an unforgivable act of violence"--

We started the meeting generally negative about the book, mostly because we found the actions of the wife inscrutable, particularly in that she basically ditches her husband when she realizes her baby is a fake without ever even trying to communicate with him. Demetri pointed out and we came around to agreeing that the parts of the book that are straight genre fiction (the wife attacking the main character, the graveyard scene) are great bits of writing, but no one could defend the ridiculous women's fort in the middle of the East River, and the troll villain just made no sense. That said, the subtext of the lived experience of the main character as a black man in New York was very consistently and believably depicted, and we thought that was a strong point in the book's favor. Ultimately, we saw the book as a project in modern fairy tale writing, and we felt the author's success with that was similar to Boy, Snow, Bird -- unfortunately the novel failed to be magically real in a poetic, allegorical sense or to create an interesting story world a la Harry Potter. We concluded that it was a weak book with some very good horror passages that would have been better if the author committed to the genre he was flirting with.