Style: Eye of the Beholder

I'm currently reading a YA book (The Book Thief) that has been celebrated by the press and received numerous awards (more on the book next Monday).  For me, though, I'm having difficulty managing my way through the prolouge where the descriptions are meant to be clever and arch, I suppose, but instead I find them perplexing and simply strange.  For example, a description of skin as skeleton colored is brilliant whereas the description "there were black crumbs, and pepper, streaked across the redness" less engaging.



In cases like this I'm left to wonder if there isn't a bandwagon effect going on.  Or perhaps I simply prize a different style.  (Or maybe I'm just too simplistic.)  But the prose that speaks to me is often clean, clear, evocative.  I think Kent Haruf of Plainsong fame achieves this type of style that I'm describing like few others have.  There is a woman in my writing group who comes a close second.  The writing is not terse, but concise - not a word wasted.



When I first began blogging a few weeks back, I noticed that if I gave myself a word challenge to cut my word count in half, my writing dramatically improved.  I find that as I read YA books, among others, I am wishing that others would attempt this same sort of precision.