Teresa's Reviews > The Colony

At first I wondered about this book’s style, specifically, so much direct address, which came across too polite (sometimes I read it as condescending), especially when only two characters are in a scene. But with the lack of quotation marks and so much dialogue, it did help in knowing who was talking to whom.

I loved when the dialogue flowed into a single character’s thought process. It’s much like Magee’s description of the painterly process, of the way an artist sees (which I connected to the writerly process), which becomes more complicated (in theme) as the story goes on.

This is all in contrast to the interspersed short factual sections. At first I wondered if the two types of sections might not be of the same time period, as life on the island seemed so “old-fashioned.” But as with the rest of the novel—the characters, the themes, the setting—I feel it should be left to the reader to discover, how it all evolves, how it’s all revealed.