Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Average Customer Rating:

Good book... Pass it on.

Customer Rating:

THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO by Sarah Hall was a very good character story of the Bildungsroman variety. Young Cyril Parks matures through a series of life's lessons beginning with his mother's tuberculosis hotel, adolescent high-jinks, and a non-traditional apprenticeship with a scurrilous tattoo artist, Eliot Riley. From there he ventures into the world "on his own," to find love and success, or at least his own definition of both. The first half of the novel is set in a sleepy little English seaside town, and the second half in New York's Coney Island shortly before World War Two. Sarah Hall is an up and coming master of prose, and in this work she has added delightful character descriptions reminiscent of Lawrence, Faulkner, or James. For those experienced with the world of tattoos, or for anyone who has ever seriously considered one, this story will surely be compelling. I bought this based on Amazon reviews and now it is a book I highly recommend.

Amazing work from a young author

Customer Rating:

This novel is breathtaking. I found the writing to be exciting with just the right amount of embellishment and it has a beautiful flow. The subject matter is painstakingly researched and the settings are wonderfully textured. The plot is dark, complex, and fascinating. When I found out it was only the author's second novel, I was amazed. This is a masterfully crafted novel for someone so young. This is easily one of the most intriguing books I have read in over a year. I highly recommend this book for anyone who appreciates beautiful use of language.

Sometimes disturbing, but compelling and emotionally stirring

Customer Rating:

I couldn't resist this 2005 novel when I heard it was about a tattoo artist. The fact that it was writen by Sara Hall, a Brit born in 1974 and a Booker Prize finalist with a fresh new voice in literature, made it even more appealing. From the very beginning I was captivated. Ms. Hall paints pictures with words and stirs emotions. And most of the emotions she stirs are disturbing and sometimes bordering on the grotesque. The story is compelling too, beginning in the seaside town of Morecambe, England, where working class consumptives whose lungs were destroyed by the mills and the coal mines, often took their one-week vacation in the quest for good clean sea air. Indeed, Ms. Hall was raised a few towns away and her descriptions of a widow hotelkeeper and her young son Cy the early part of the 20th Century introduced me to a time and a place that I will never forget. I will also never forget the main character, Cy, who grows up in the town where he apprentices to a foul-mouthed hard-drinking tattoo artist with a garrulous nature and larger-than-life persona. Later, our hero travels to America, where he sets up tattooing in Coney Island. It is the 1930s now, and Coney Island is in its heyday. Even though it was across the ocean from Cy's native Morecambe, it was a similar seaside resort catering to the appetites of a working class population looking for the outrageous and bizarre as a break from their own lives of struggle during the depression. Here, Cy meets Grace who does a horse act and even manages to sneak the horse into her Brooklyn apartment. She's a refugee from war-torn Europe, her background is a mystery and she, too, is larger than life. She wants an outrageous total body tattoo, and this act, with all its needles and inks and pain, is described in exquisite detail as an intimate connection between these two potential lovers. How it all plays out is not what I expected. There's an act of violence. There's an act of revenge. And then there are the years that pass. Eventually, I was left with a feeling of discomfort as well as completion. And I was also left with the feeling that Sara Hall is an extremely talented writer and that we will hear a lot more about her in years to come. Naturally, The Electric Michelangelo is not for everyone. But if you like a novel with a fine writing style, in-depth complex characters and a sense of looking at weird and offbeat side of history, you'll love this book.

Overcast skies in coastal towns

Customer Rating:

If you like Dickensian writing, then this will be a good read for you. Fascinating story, though dark. Meticulously written. I found myself slogging through this novel with some unresolved plot around Riley Eliot, Cy's mentor and Renna Parks, his mother and with Grace. It is a book to be read slowly and savored with a pint. There are gaps in the timeline...time at war, recovering from wounds, and Cy reminiscing on unstated sinister deeds.

A Rare Gem

Customer Rating:

This is without a doubt one of the finest novels I have ever read. The writing is pure heaven, the metaphors and similes are creative divinity--where does she get them? She is so highly gifted and so young that she can look forward to a wonderful career and you can be sure that I will follow her progress. Yes the novel can be heavy going at times but the beauty of her story and her talent as a writer just kept me wanting more and I earmarked so many passages because they were the finest, among the best poetry that I have ever read, her imagination and facility with language is stunning, not to mention the level of research that she did. A wonderful and rare performance--Bravo!