Reading time: About one minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about the metaphors of Liz Moore….
Liz Moore is an American author and an Associate Professor of English at Temple University, where she serves as the Creative Writing Director. After a brief time as a musician in New York City, which inspired her first novel, The Words of Every Song, Moore shifted her focus to writing.
Her most recent book, The God of the Woods, tells the story of a participant at a summer camp who’s gone missing. What complicates matters is the missing camper is the daughter of the (wealthy) founding family of the camp.
Liz Moore not only manages to produce a compelling plot, but she also displays some highly evocative language.
Here are my favourite examples:
- Her rather once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.
- She’s been Tessie Jo at the time, a frilly name, a name for a doll or a cow or some sort of entertainer, all wrong for such a stoic child.
- But on T.J., the [hair]cut seemed simply to indicate a lack of concern for early matters. It functioned, like a monk’s tonsure, to separate her from the laypeople at the camp.
[Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons by William He. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.]
