Book Review: Stray Dogs by Rawi Hage

11.05.2022

By Zara Reed

***

Category: Fiction, Short Stories
Author: Rawi Hage
Format: Hardcover, 210 pages
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Canada
ISBN: 978-0-7352-7362-7
Pub Date: March 1, 2022

***

Summary from the Publisher:

In Montreal, a photographer’s unexpected encounter with actress Sophia Loren leads to a life-altering revelation about his dead mother. In Beirut, a disillusioned geologist eagerly awaits the destruction that will come with an impending tsunami. In Tokyo, a Jordanian academic delivering a lecture at a conference receives haunting news from the Persian Gulf. And in Berlin, a Lebanese writer forms a fragile, fateful bond with his voluble German neighbours.

The irresistible characters in Stray Dogs lead radically different lives, but all are restless travelers, moving between states–nation-states and states of mind–seeking connection, escaping the past and following delicate threads of truth, only to experience the sometimes shocking, sometimes amusing and often random ways our fragile modern identities are constructed, destroyed, and reborn. Politically astute, philosophically wise, humane, relevant and caustically funny, these stories reveal the singular vision of award-winning writer Rawi Hage at his best.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

Rawi Hage’s collection of short stories in the book, Stray Dogs, consists of 11 pieces of narrative that move from sparse to almost cynical; written as fiction, yet in its undertone seem to take on a form of the bravado of an essayist, asserting itself through the dialogue and voice of an intellectual academic.

Its third person narrative in its detached view and quality leans toward this dissertation “feel” of the book, a collective bargaining tool and challenge to those who must consider the stories’ resistance against class norms, politics, religion—even memory.

Throughout the stories, too, is a running theme of Hage’s wrestle with his investigation and articulation of the significance of the process and purpose of photography, to the nature and premise—or rather, the promise—of the photograph itself. The reader is indirectly asked to consider the photograph and its image as more than a medium of preservation of a moment or record, but something that could be far more meaningful and/or contradictory.

The characters can be as zealous as they are sardonic and secretive; hyperbolic as they are dramatic; and even sentimental and sad, though restrained in their expression of such trauma or feeling.

Setting and plots are bound by cusps of social and emotional revolution; internalized fantasy and grief; and all speak to the emotional landscape that the characters tread themselves into, having to face varying forms of inevitable loss and surprising danger.

But to reach such conclusions, the reader must receive what Hage only implies through the narrative, revealed only through what Hage does not write and leaves unsaid. The power in Hage’s writing is not in the dialogue or narrative itself—for me, its detached style presses me into a corner in which I must silently, yet coercively become a more proactive reader—but in the white space of the page in which the reader must consider what Hage has purposely and innovatively chosen to leave out.

So, if you’re looking for a “light” read in which the obvious will be easily fed to you through descriptive, lyrical language and a hedonistic, automatic connection with the emotional nuances of a character or characters—this is not the book for you.

The pacing of the stories vary from stark to essayist convoluted verbiage, but if patient enough to return and perhaps do a second or third re-reading, emotional subtleties and even sentimentality may arise and reveal themselves.

The characters’ border crossings in these stories travel further than geographical distances and concurrently traverse emotional landscape and memory, those didactic towards the cyclic nature of life, death, ambition, validation, and loss.

***

Stray Dogs by Rawi Hage has been shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which will announce its winner on November 7, at 9:00pm EST.

***

Characters: 3 stars
Plot: 3 stars
Language/Narrative: 2.5 stars
Dialogue: 2.5 stars
Pacing: 3 stars
Cover Design: 2 stars

***

Rating

***

About the Author:

Rawi Hage is a Lebanese Canadian writer and photographer.

Born in Beirut, Hage grew up in Lebanon and Cyprus. He moved to New York City in 1982, and after studying at the New York Institute of Photography, relocated to Montreal in 1991, where he studied arts at Dawson College and Concordia University. He subsequently began exhibiting as a photographer, and has had works acquired by the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la civilisation de Québec.

Hage has published journalism and fiction in several Canadian magazines. His debut novel, De Niro’s Game, was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. He was also awarded two Quebec awards, Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize at the Quebec Writers’ Federation literary awards.

• From Goodreads

You can connect with the author, Rawi Hage, on Facebook.

Welcome to “The Preface”

11.01.2022

By Zara Reed

Due to the seismic shift that came with the unforeseen arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the death of my father; fundamental aspects of my day-to-day routine were barraged to a halt including the carefree ability to indulge in the leisurely reading of a new book, let alone produce a coherent, intelligent critique apt for a posting on my 10-year-old blog.

What was formerly known as The Bibliotaphe Closet book blog—a space I had created with the intention to house anything and almost everything remotely associated with the love of reading and a profound passion for the written word, had informally and discreetly diminished itself into an unintentional silence. The Bibliotaphe Closet had hinged its doors to the stealth and inevitability of the passage of time. Time that I could no longer restrain, nor reserve for such a gratifying and what seemed to be a simple, yet more complex endeavour.

But as conditions also run their course, even evolve, and change—much like the social variables invoked by the pandemic itself—hope unhurriedly eased itself into the eventual shrinking of social distance rules, and gradually coaxed fear and hesitancy into an increasing confidence that allowed us to remove and rip off the face masks from over our mouths and noses, to reconsider a plausible safety in the return, relief, and necessity of nearness, touch, and community.

With that in mind, I felt it reasonable to once again consider what I, myself, could allow myself to return to post-pandemic—including the reclamation of my old and sentimental, yet deeply entrenched and renewed passion for excellent literary fiction.

Would it be safe enough for me to return to my old literary spaces without apprehension? Say, renew my patronage at my local public library and read a book again at leisure at my favourite cafe?

Was my grief for my father’s passing ready to brave a new chapter—and quite literally, ones found in newly published books—in a world where both the pandemic and the devastation I felt, was, too, meandering its way to some form of acceptance and healing?

Maybe.

But what to do with a blog that’s door slowly swung to a close due to a pandemic and a grief that needed its isolation to mute itself in pause in order to navigate such change, such loss? It only seemed reasonable to resurrect it, but in doing so, also perhaps more importantly, to legitimize its potential rebirth with the hopefulness and distinction of a new name.

The word, preface, is defined as:

an introduction to a book, typically stating its subject, scope, or aims.

What better description to use than that for a space that aims to house bookish content and book reviews?

And so, I decided in that epiphany, that “eureka” moment, that yes—The Bibliotaphe Closet doors could yet again be opened to a new beginning, a preface, if you will—The Preface—a place eager to state the “subject, scope, [and potential] aims” as I believe to them to be, according to my opinion and literary criticism of the books I will be privileged to read and review again in the time that I may be afforded.

So welcome back. And welcome to the new renovation of this reader’s (and writer’s) much loved and much missed “bibliotaphe closet.” Its door is now open and I can’t wait to give you a tour.

Book Review: The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden

05.30.2020

By Zara Reed

***

Category: Fiction, Fantasy, Winternight Trilogy #3
Author: Katherine Arden
Format: Paperback, 372 pages
Publisher: Del Rey, imprint of Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-1-1018-8600-7
Pub Date: January 10, 2019

***

Summary from the Publisher:

Following their adventures in The Bear and the Nightingale and The Girl in the Tower, Vasya and Morozko return in this stunning conclusion to the estselling Winternight Trilogy, battling enemies mortal and magical to save both Russias, the seen and the unseen.

Now Moscow has been struck by disaster. Its people are searching for answers—and for someone to blame. Vasya finds herself alone, beset on all sides. The Grand Prince is in a rage, choosing allies that will lead him on a path to war and ruin. A wicked demon returns, stronger than ever and determined to spread chaos. Caught at the center of the conflict is Vasya, who finds the fate of two worlds resting on her shoulders. Her destiny uncertain, Vasya will uncover surprising truths about herself and her history as she desperately tries to save Russia, Morozko, and the magical world she treasures. But she may not be able to save them all.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

The Winter of the Witch is the third and last installment of the Winternight trilogy by Katherine Arden where the protagonist, Vasilisa Petrovna (Vasya), works to band together human folk, Chyerti, the various spirits of Russian folklore, and those with supernatural gifts together to end the war between Rus and the Tartars.

While the second book in the trilogy, The Girl in the Tower, helped secondary characters propel the story and plot to continue on in the foundation in which it was laid; the last book is a culmination of both human and the Chyerti supernatural worlds.

While Vasya’s incessant arguments, stubborn willfulness, and whining became almost unbearable, which made her seem petulant in the second book, The Girl in the Tower; by the third and last book, her goal to win the war against the Tartars and advocate on behalf of all Chyerti had become her one sole purpose and the intent of the novel.

It introduced other characters into the story to make Vasya’s back story and genetic history more rich and palpable with characters such as Polunochnitsa known as Lady Midnight; the Bolotnik, the Swamp-Demon; a Domovaya, Guardian of the House by the Lake; Ded Grib, the Mushroom-Spirit; the Bagiennik, Chyert of the Water; Baba Yaga, Guardian of the Lake in Midnight; to name a few.

The language fits the formality of medieval diction and enhanced the supernatural elements and setting in the book. And reading, further along, the plot quickly eases into itself, which allows the reader to forget the difficulty of the book’s formal language and the number of its foreign names.

And the pacing is quicker than the books previously written with its heavily plot-driven story. The plot is creative with its implementation of supernatural elements such as the road, Midnight, and the detailed sensory roles of the various Chyerti in the novel.

As the last book in the Winternight trilogy, the novel successfully ties together, the protagonist, Vasya’s purpose in her relationship with Morozko, the Winter-King and Medved, the Bear, along with her giftedness of sight and sensitive care towards nature and the world of Chyerti, as well as her leadership role as a woman battling on behalf of her townspeople, Rus.

While the first book, The Bear and the Nightingale, introduces Vasya’s character and her gifts; the second book, The Girl in the Tower, adds more characters to thicken the story into a workable plot and a feasible, yet highly unexpected and unlikely romance. By the end of the trilogy, you see all books and stories come together to answer Vasya’s insatiable hunger for adventure, danger, and freedom.

Though each book could successfully be read as standalone novels, the trip in reading all three in the trilogy is worth the imagination and the investment. It is part history, part adventure, and part dark fairytale—all effective tools in engaging readers until its last page. Though not a brilliant novel, it is interesting enough to remember and enjoy if you’re particular to dark fantasy, passionate romance, and petulant girls endowed with supernatural gifts, and an omniscient author who always shows her regrettable favour.

***

Characters: 3.5 stars
Plot: 4 stars
Language/Narrative: 3 stars
Dialogue: 3 stars
Pacing: 3.5 stars
Cover Design: 3 stars

***

Rating

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Del Rey for providing me with a copy of The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

• From Goodreads

Born in Texas, Katherine studied French and Russian at Middlebury College. She has lived abroad in France and in Moscow, among other places. She has also lived in Hawaii, where she wrote much of The Bear and the Nightingale. She currently lives in Vermont.

• From Goodreads

Links:

You can connect with the author, Katherine Arden, on her official website, Twitter, and Goodreads.

Book Review: The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden

05.27.2020

By Zara Reed

***

Category: Fiction, Fantasy, Winternight Trilogy #2
Author: Katherine Arden
Format: Paperback, 376 pages
Publisher: Del Rey, imprint of Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-1-78- 503107-6
Pub Date: June 26, 2018

***

Summary from the Publisher:

The court of the Grand Prince of Moscow is plagued by power struggles and rumours of unrest. Meanwhile bandits roam the countryside, burning the villages and kidnapping its daughters. Setting out to defeat the raiders, the Prince and his trusted companion come across a young man riding a magnificent horse.

Only Sasha, a priest with a warrior’s training, recognises this ‘boy’ as his younger sister, thought to be dead or a witch by her village. But when Vasya proves herself in battle, riding with remarkable skill and inexplicable power, Sasha realises he must keep her secret as she may be the only way to save the city from threats both human and fantastical.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

The Girl in the Tower is the second installment of the Winternight trilogy by Katherine Arden where the protagonist, Vasilisa Petrovna (Vasya), actively resists the oppressive social and cultural expectations imposed upon her—marriage, children, and rural domestication, or solitude and propriety within the walls of an orthodox convent, both in the setting of medieval Russia.

While the first book in the trilogy, The Bear and the Nightingale, focuses on elucidating the natural elements and powers held by the protagonist, The Girl in the Tower, allows secondary characters to propel the story and plot further with characters such as: the Grand Prince of Moscow, Dimitri Ivanovich; Vasya’s brother, Aleksandr Petrovich (Sasha); and sister, Olga Vladimirova; and Morozko, the Winter-King.

While Vasya’s supernatural gifts and desire for adventure made her endearing in the first book, The Bear and the Nightingale, by the second book, The Girl in the Tower, her incessant arguments, stubborn willfulness, and whining became almost unbearable, which made her seem petulant. In contrast to this, the character Morozko, the Winter-King, is distinguished in his quiet strength, cool dignity, repressed passion, and natural regal. The Winter-King embodies a romantic’s notion of a dark, yet princely protector of his chosen beloved, which is far more intriguing than the ongoing and erratic petulance of a girl-child refusing to be an engaging and beautiful woman.

The language fit the formality of medieval diction and enhanced the supernatural elements and setting in the book. At first, it took time to acclimatize to its busy diction and the diverse range of interchangeable, almost unrecognizable, and sometimes unpronounceable names and historical geno-connections. But, reading further along, the plot slowly eases itself into better story-movement that allows the reader to forget the difficulty of the book’s formal language and the amount of its foreign names.

The pacing felt slow up until the last quarter of the book at which the story picked up its pace through the surprising outcome of the plot.

As a second installment in a trilogy, the book successfully bridged the first and last books together to further move its overarching Winternight storyline to its historical and supernatural collision and end.

***

Characters: 3 stars
Plot: 3 stars
Language/Narrative: 3 stars
Dialogue: 3 stars
Pacing: 3 stars
Cover Design: 3 stars

***

Rating

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Del Rey for providing me with a copy of The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

• From Goodreads

Born in Texas, Katherine studied French and Russian at Middlebury College. She has lived abroad in France and in Moscow, among other places. She has also lived in Hawaii, where she wrote much of The Bear and the Nightingale. She currently lives in Vermont.

Links:

You can connect with the author, Katherine Arden, on her official website, Twitter, and Goodreads.

Book Review: My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

04.28.2020

By Zara Reed

***

Category:
Author: Gabriel Tallent
Format: Trade Paperback, 420 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Books, imprint of Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1117-9
Pub Date: August 29, 2017

***

Summary from Publisher:

At 14, Turtle Alveston knows the use of every gun on her wall. She knows how to snare a rabbit, sharpen a blade and splint a bone. She knows that her daddy loves her more than anything else in this world and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her with him.

But she doesn’t know why she feels so different from the other girls at school; why the line between love and pain can be so hard to see. Or why making a friend may be the bravest and most terrifying thing she has ever done.

Sometimes the people you’re supposed to trust are the ones who do most harm. And what you’ve been taught to fear is the very thing that will save you…

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

The novel, My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent, is a haunting novel that reverberates the lyrical mastery of language and the poise of intelligence and gifted craftsmanship. The novel reduces readers into a world that is enthralling and vast as its setting, much like the encompassing bewilderment and dangers of nature, yet terrifies and nullifies comprehension and belief with its taut tension and abrasive cruelty.

This is a book that readers will not simply peruse and superficially consider but will submerge themselves under from the weight of its raw violence and emotional complexity.

The characters are neither cliched, nor superficial, but carved out of imagination and realism.

Turtle Alveston is tragically unique in her isolated upbringing, more a child to the wild than she is to civilization; and calculated in her precision and self-efficacy in deftly meeting her intended targets at the barrel of her gun. She knows the wilderness, mapping it out through the barefooted soles of her calloused feet, recognizing territory through foliage species to the anatomy of riverbeds and the wildlife beneath. The wilderness, simultaneously her escape and her prison, hides her from a world that always pulls her back to her tormenter, Martin Alveston, her father.

Martin Alveston is broad in body as he is narrow in his apocalyptic thinking; cruel as they consider him charismatic; and possessed with the compulsion to control, manipulate, and torment his daughter; possessive of her whereabouts, driven to obsession and madness of who she is, and that she fully and wholly belongs only to him.

Other characters transpire around her, those that provide newness, solace, sometimes hope: Daniel Alveston, her grandfather, who affectionately calls her Sweetpea; Jacob Learner and his friend, Brett, boys she encounters in the wilderness who expose her to peer connection and the possibility of friendship; Anna, a schoolteacher whose belief in her ability to grow and thrive finally convinces her to reconsider her efforts; and Cayenne, a younger sister figure that compels her to action.

The plot is vividly tense with its movement between safety and terror, calm and intensity, speculation and self-deprecation. It is taut with raw, graphic cruelty and dark violence that it is, at times, extremely difficult to read. The story is a legacy to survival in its most desperate form. And the hardness of its main characters are complex and emotionally intertwined by psychosomatic symptoms rooted in a turbulent and traumatic past.

The language and narrative, though, is fluent in its lyrical eloquence, lush in its precision, and exacting in its brutality. The dialogue, both internal and external, are convincingly realistic that the characters become vivid caricatures extrapolated from imagination and fiction, but also unforgettable people with whom the reader becomes most intimate.

The pacing is close to perfect, though a section of the plot could have been easily omitted to move the story further and faster to its climactic peak.

And the cover design is as deceptive and secretive of the story’s contents as the characters and plot itself, leaving the reader to imagine what its dark heroine, Turtle Alveston and her tormentor, Martin Alveston, look like and what may recede behind the thick foliage of the forest that isolates them both from the world.

This is a dark and emotionally wrought novel that will inflict you with fear and courage, hoping for the ultimate emancipation and freedom for its most tormented characters. It will make you witness the horrifying, yet deeply complex nature of love, hate, dependence, deprivation, compulsion, possession, and hardened will that exists in the relationships of complex trauma. And it will move you to fear, to anguish—and to tears.

***

Characters: 5 stars
Plot: 5 stars
Language/Narrative: 5 stars
Dialogue: 5 stars
Pacing: 4 stars
Cover Design: 4 stars

***

Rating

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Riverhead Books for providing me with a copy of My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

• From Penguin Random House Canada website

Gabriel Tallent is the author of the New York Times-bestselling novel My Absolute Darling. He was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast by two mothers. He received his B.A. from Willamette University in 2010, and after graduation spent two seasons leading youth trail crews in the backcountry of the Pacific Northwest. Tallent lives in Salt Lake City.

• From Penguin Random House Canada website

Links:

You can connect with the author, Gabriel Tallent, on his official website and Goodreads. 

Book Review: Vox by Christine Dalcher

04.22.2020

By Zara Reed

***

Category: Dystopian Feminist Fiction
Author: Christina Dalcher
Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN: 978-0-4400-0078-5
Pub Date: August 21, 2018

***

Summary from Publisher:

Set in an America where half the population has been silenced, VOX is the harrowing, unforgettable story of what one woman will do to protect herself and her daughter.

On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed to speak more than 100 words daily, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial—this can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to her.

This is just the beginning.

Soon women can no longer hold jobs. Girls are no longer taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words a day, but now women only have one hundred to make themselves heard.

But this is not the end.

For herself, her daughter, and every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

The novel, Vox, by Christina Dalcher, is a feminist testament to the dangers of extremist, patriarchal power that overindulges its idea of absolute oppression towards girls and women in a fictional, global dictatorship where they lose their autonomy, liberty, and legal right to think, speak, and act without the consent and overseeing power of their husbands, fathers, and men in their lives. This fictional society brands girls and women with an electrical band that counts their words, limiting their speech to only 100 words a day. To exceed that amount would induce an electrical shock with each punishment of pain, worse with each consecutive infringement.

The novel is extreme in its ideology that such a society would unravel itself into systemic oppression so deep and severe that women’s rights would be accosted by men so brutal and narcissistic for power that implementation of such a device would warrant a global pandemic of patriarchal ignorance and barbarity.

While the plot could be plausible, the novel’s target in scapegoating the evangelical, Bible-believing Christian community was harsh, judgmental, and presumptuous about its beliefs and values without truly understanding the tenets of its faith. I feel if a community will be condemned, even fictionally, those who author such misguided information should first be part of that community to have some inkling of knowledge and understanding of the community’s doctrine and experience before unfairly misjudging it and showcasing it to the reading public in a biased, unfair, negative light. If the author is not part of the community it condemns—especially a faith community—it should do so responsibly by diligently researching facts in attempting to understand the reasoning behind a faith community’s doctrine and personal call to live out its spiritual principles.

The novel polarizes the characters between the objectified, domesticated women stripped of their career titles, positions in the workforce, and subjugated to silence in the home, and the men whose free reign to oppress women move them into undeserved positions of power, lust, and discrimination.

The plot moves easily into the extremities of this feminist dystopia, where women who are most outspoken are sent to torture farms where they are ostracized and sentenced to lifelong menial labour meant to instill punishment and degradation.

The language and narrative are contemporary and simplistic but move with enough ease that the pacing is readable and ongoing until the end of the book.

Though the story is aversive to women’s rights and is excessive in its oppression and polarity, it is a sharp reminder of what can happen when not only women’s rights but human rights are infringed upon.

As most dystopias tend to exaggerate traumatic societies with little idealism, their purpose is to create a heightened awareness and warn us against social injustices that could hypothetically take place if we fail to be mindful, socially conscious, and consistently proactive.

Let’s hope that the ideas in Vox remain as they are—fiction.

***

Characters: 3 stars
Plot: 3 stars
Language/Narrative: 3 stars
Dialogue: 3 stars
Pacing: 3 stars
Cover Design: 3 stars

***

Rating

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Riverhead Books for providing me with a copy of Vox by Christina Dalcher in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

Christina Dalcher earned her doctorate in theoretical linguistics from Georgetown University. She specialized in the phonetics of sound change in Italian and British dialects and taught at universities in the United States, England, and the United Arab Emirates.

Her short stories and flash fiction appear in over one hundred journals worldwide. Recognitions include first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Award as well as nominations for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions.

Laura Bradford of Bradford Literary Agency represents Dalcher’s novels.

After spending several years abroad, most recently in Sri Lanka, Dalcher and her husband now split their time between the American South and Andalucia, Spain.

Her debut novel, VOX, was published in August 2018 by Berkley (an imprint of Penguin Random House) and has been translated into twenty languages.

Dalcher’s second novel, MASTER CLASS, will be out in the spring of 2020.

• From Goodreads

Links:

You can connect with the author, Christina Dalcher, through her official website, Facebook, and Goodreads.

Book Review: Women Talking by Miriam Toews

04.20.2020

By Zara Reed

***

Category: Fiction
Author: Miriam Toews
Format: Hardcover,  224 pages
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Canada
ISBN: 978-0-7352-7396-2
Pub Date: August 21, 2018

***

Summary from Publisher:

A transformative and necessary work–as completely unexpected as it is inspired–by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.

Based on actual events that happened between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite community where more than 100 girls and women were drugged unconscious and assaulted in the night by what they were told (by the men of the colony) were “ghosts” or “demons,” Miriam Toews’ bold and affecting novel Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events.

The novel takes place over forty-eight hours, as eight women gather in secret in a neighbour’s barn while the men are in a nearby town posting bail for the attackers. They have come together to debate, on behalf of all the women and children in the community, whether to stay or leave before the men return. Taking minutes is the one man trusted and invited by the women to witness the conversation–a former outcast whose own surprising story is revealed as the women speak.

By turns poignant, witty, acerbic, bitter, tender, devastating, and heartbreaking, the voices in this extraordinary novel are unforgettable. Toews has chosen to focus the novel tightly on a particular time and place, and yet it contains within its 48 hours and setting inside a hayloft an entire vast universe of thinking and feeling about the experience of women (and therefore men, too) in our contemporary world. In a word: astonishing.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

The novel, Women Talking, is a fictional work based on true-life events between 2005 and 2009 where a Mennonite colony whose girls and women were drugged and sexually attacked in the night against their knowledge by eight men in their community who used animal anesthetic to knock them unconscious and rape them.

The book is a long dialogue between these women and the decision they are called to face in the knowledge of what has been taken from them: their virtue, the autonomy over their bodies, and the risk of failing their faith’s goal: entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

And to transcribe this dialogue is the educated, yet sentimental character, August Epp, a young man whose family’s ex-communication from the colony when he was a child, returns as a man whose redemption comes from his secular education, his usefulness as the boys’ school teacher, and his desire for return and belonging.

The dialogue seemed far-fetched in its portrayal of some women whose brutal secularism seemed as harsh as their profanity amid other holy women of faith. I was disappointed in this depiction and had not expected the dialogue to include profanity since I expected Mennonites, especially its women, to be a God-fearing people whose doctrine is to faithfully adhere to the Holy Bible.

But, there were a few moments of quiet unity, a feminine empowerment in gathering and sharing, women who knew each other well enough to be themselves and discuss options for their future and the future of their children together.

The plot was neither comprehensive, nor rich enough to be interesting, failing to expose its readers to the innocent pacificism of its colonists and believers, which I would have loved to read, but did not find.

The narrative was far too philosophical and somewhat removed, speaking to larger issues, rather than bringing readers in to share an intimate view of the women, their feelings, or the specificity of their stories, and their needs. The women’s dialogue had become a list of names whose ideas could have belonged to anyone, which kept readers at an indifferent distance.

And the pacing was frustratingly slow that it prompted the need for breaks.

I had hoped for more interaction between the characters, August Epp and Ona Friessen, a repressed love wishing itself to be expressed through the entirety of the novel and yet stifled beneath the politics of loft talks and urgent planning. The story I was more intrigued with was August Epp’s story amidst the women’s dialogue, the struggle he could have had in navigating a balance between the knowledge of the secular world and the religious world of his Mennonite heritage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough of that disclosed in the novel to satiate my curiosity or my empathy towards the characters whose travesty deserved more than secret meetings in a loft and transposed on parchment paper.

***

Characters: 2.5 stars
Plot: 2.5 stars
Language/Narrative: 3 stars
Dialogue: 2.5 stars
Pacing: 2.5 stars
Cover Design: 2.5 stars

***

Rating

 

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Knopf Canada for providing me with a copy of Women Talking by Miriam Toews in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

• From Goodreads

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Toews studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King’s College in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist. Her non-fiction book “Swing Low: A Life” was a memoir of her father, a victim of lifelong depression. Her 2004 novel “A Complicated Kindness” was her breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General’s Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Russian Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads.

A series of letters she wrote in 2000 to the father of her son were published on the website www.openletters.net and were profiled on the radio show This American Life in an episode about missing parents.

In 2007 she made her screen debut in the Mexican film “Luz silenciosa” directed by Carlos Reygadas, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

In Sept. 2008, Knopf Canada published her novel “The Flying Troutmans”, about a 28-year-old woman from Manitoba who takes her 15-year-old nephew and 11-year-old niece on a road trip to California after their mentally ill mother has been hospitalized.

The book, Irma Voth, was released in April 2011. Her latest book, All My Puny Sorrows, was published in April 2014.

• From Goodreads

Links:

You can connect with the author on: Goodreads.

 

Book Review: Trickster Drift by Eden Robinson

07.09.2019

By Zara Reed

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Category: Fiction, Indigenous
Author: Eden Robinson
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 978-0-7352-7343-6
Pub Date: October 2, 2018

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Summary from Publisher:

Following the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted Son of a Trickster comes Trickster Drift, the second book in Eden Robinson’s captivating Trickster trilogy.

In an effort to keep all forms of magic at bay, Jared, 17, has quit drugs and drinking. But his troubles are not over: now he’s being stalked by David, his mom’s ex–a preppy, khaki-wearing psycho with a proclivity for rib-breaking. And his mother, Maggie, a living, breathing badass as well as a witch, can’t protect him like she used to because he’s moved away from Kitimat to Vancouver for school.

Even though he’s got a year of sobriety under his belt (no thanks to his enabling, ever-partying mom), Jared also struggles with the temptation of drinking. And he’s got to get his grades up, find a job that doesn’t involve weed cookies, and somehow live peacefully with his Aunt Mave, who has been estranged from the family ever since she tried to “rescue” him as a baby from his mother. An indigenous activist and writer, Mave smothers him with pet names and hugs, but she is blind to the real dangers that lurk around them–the spirits and supernatural activity that fill her apartment.

As the son of a Trickster, Jared is a magnet for magic, whether he hates it or not–he sees ghosts, he sees the monster moving underneath his Aunt Georgina’s skin, he sees the creature that comes out of his bedroom wall and creepily wants to suck his toes. He also still hears the Trickster in his head, and other voices, too. When the David situation becomes a crisis, Jared can’t ignore his true nature any longer.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

Trickster Drift by Eden Robinson is the second installment of the Trickster Trilogy starring Jared Martin, post-alcoholic teenager whose genetic makeup and difficult social upbringing leads him into a polar world of neglect, abuse, and fantastical, yet often times, horrific magic.

The sequel introduces new characters, some of those who are as real as they are other-worldly: Mave, Jared’s social activist aunt whose driving skills are as reckless as her abandonment to affection and ignorance to magic; David, Jared’s unrelenting stalker and tormenter; Dent, Jared’s live-in ghost whose obsession with science-fiction television outweighs his desire to leave and seek asylum elsewhere; Eliza, Jared’s neighbour’s gifted daughter; Shu, Eliza’s ghost protector and friend; and Neeka, a sensual, but demanding Otter creature whose hunt for Wee’git holds Jared magically hostage.

The plot, benign in its protagonist’s hope for a “normal” future—one that includes a college degree, a job, potentially a non-magical girlfriend—moves “ordinarily” in its introduction of the novel’s secondary characters into a diffusion of creative absurdity, a whole new world of magical strangeness that entraps the reader into Jared’s world of other-worldliness, one that he readily attempts to ignore and deny.

Yet, the boy’s dichotomy between an abusive upbringing filled with rough violence and physical, emotional danger is precariously entwined into a world of fantastical, graphic intensity. Magic and those who belong to it, attach themselves to Jared with magnetic ferocity and strangeness, compelled by their own nature, and drawn to the inexplicable and undeniable truth of who Jared is.

While Jared’s gifts are latent, pulsing beneath the thoughts he cannot help himself to think, he soon comes to realize there is more to him—and this world—than what he’s desired or imagined.

***

Characters:  3.5 stars
Plot:  3 stars
Language/Narrative:  3 stars
Dialogue:  3.5 stars
Pacing: 3 stars
Cover Design:  3 stars

***

Rating

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Knopf Canada for providing me with a copy of Trickster Drift by Eden Robinson in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

• From Goodreads

EDEN ROBINSON has matriarchal tendencies. Doesn’t have a pressure cooker, but knows how to jar salmon. Her smoked salmon will not likely kill you. Hobbies: Shopping for the Apocalypse, using vocabulary as a weapon, nominating cousins to council while they’re out of town, chair yoga, looking up possible diseases or syndromes on the interwebs, perfecting gluten-free bannock and playing Mah-jong. Be warned, she writes novels and tends to be cranky when interrupted.

• From publisher’s website.

Links:

You can contact the author on Goodreads.

Book Review: A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

04.27.2019

By Zara Reed

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Category: Non-fiction, essays
Author: Alicia Elliott
Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 978-0-3856-9238-0
Pub Date: March 26, 2019

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Summary from Publisher:

In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight and understanding to the ongoing legacy of colonialism. What are the links between depression, colonialism and loss of language–both figurative and literal? How does white privilege operate in different contexts? How do we navigate the painful contours of mental illness in loved ones without turning them into their sickness? How does colonialism operate on the level of literary criticism?

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is Alicia Elliott’s attempt to answer these questions and more. In the process, she engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing and representation. Elliott makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political–from overcoming a years-long history with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft dinner to how systematic oppression is linked to depression in Native communities. With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott extends far beyond her own experiences to provide a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present and a powerful tool for a better future.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott is an empowering, vocal testament to the ongoing struggle and survival of colonial, settler abuse through cultural genocide and attempted White-European assimilation of Indigenous peoples, in particular, the Tuscarora of the Six Nations of the Grand River of which the author belongs.

While the book is a non-fiction collection of essays, it reads as a truth-bearing, gaping wound that demands the reader’s witness, the reader’s acknowledgement, and confessed complicity in participating in the origins of those wounds.

Alicia Elliott writes as a survivor and an advocate through the lens of social justice and an anti-oppressive approach, mindful of the complexities and burdens of one’s social location within a context of political, socioeconomic dominance and ill-bearing injustice.

The brutal, yet sometimes tender, and fierce honesty in the book unravels the harsh dichotomies between the English language and the Mohawk language, how translation is almost always an approximation, a dialect most often times untranslatable. Other polarities included the Catholic religious dialect and its practices, which abrasively cause tension against traditional, Indigenous spiritual beliefs and ceremonies. Even Elliott’s father is separated into two entities: the one who had given generously of himself to his children; the other, who knew only the bitter symptoms and slurred effects of alcoholism. Elliott’s ethnic identity is split in two as well: her inherited maternal Whiteness and her inherited paternal Haudenosaunee heritage.

But the book is more than a collection of dichotomies. It is also a brave outcry against inherited colonialism and the colonizer’s inherent prejudiced assumptions and forms of discrimination: an encouragement for more than empathy to the Indigenous cause, but a call to a sober re-assessment of what it is to be authentically Indigenous.

Elliot exposes her Haudenosaunee experience as a complex, holistic entity that encompasses normalized tragedies from the weight of a long-embedded, colonial history. There is an unexpected teen pregnancy, a genetic and social history of diabetes, cerebral palsy, cancer, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, bipolar disorder, a long affair with head lice, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, poverty, lack of healthy food, clean water, high nutrition, the nomadic nature of displacement and unbelonging from gentrification to diaspora, even an uncovering of names. Did you know that Toronto was originally and once called Tkaronto?

What the book professes is an authentic, de-romanticized, unsentimental Indigenous experience on a personal and communal level. It demands that readers, non-Indigenous people, even cultural allies, take another close look at their own presumptions and biases, however, unintentional. And the interconnectedness between systemic social and historical racism, prejudice, and colonialism with the personal outcomes that Indigenous people face in the normalized context of White supremacy.

Elliott combats stereotypical hyper-myths of the “noble savage,” and the craved misconception of “Indian” beauty as sterilized forms of unrealistic impositions of portrayal from those who fail to see Indigenous people as they are, as people who have the sovereign right to control their own destinies and unravels the complexity of love and relationship in abuse.

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a vocal, participatory book of essays that will demand questioning and confession of complicity. And because of this, an honest, hopeful book in its surgical incision to get at the root of Indigenous experience, suffering, and chance for personal, political, and social change. Readers be prepared.

***

Rating

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Doubleday Canada for providing me with a copy of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott  in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River living in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, The Butter, Room, Grain, The New Quarterly, CBC, The Globe and Mail, Vice, Maclean’s, Today’s Parent and Reader’s Digest, among others. She’s currently Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Fiddlehead, Associate Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction Big Truths, and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly.

Her essay, “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards in 2017, and another of her essays, “On Seeing and Being Seen: Writing With Empathy” was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2018. She was the 2017-2018 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC, and was chosen by Tanya Talaga to receive the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize in 2018. Her short story “Unearth” has been selected by Roxane Gay to appear in Best American Short Stories 2018. Alicia is also presently working on a manuscript of short fiction.

• From Penguin Random House of Canada website.

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Book Review: The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

02.24.2019

By Zara Reed

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Category: Dystopian Feminist Fantasy
Author: Sophie Mackintosh
Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0-3855-4387-3
Pub Date: January 8, 2019

***

Summary from Publisher:

King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.

But when their father, the only man they’ve ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day three strange men wash ashore. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men?

A haunting, riveting debut about the capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.

• From Goodreads

Book Review:

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh is an enigmatic, dysptopian fantasy that arrests its readers into a cultish, dysfunctional context—a creative, but haunting story of an isolated family with three daughters kept on an island for their safety against an unknown epidemic.

But, the true epidemic reaches beyond the atmospheric conditions of the outside world. It catalyzes instead in the girls’ physio-psycho-social upbringing by parents with strict and absurd tactics that degrade and oppress these young women whose paranoia of sickness and obsession with atonement escalate into horrific acts.

And with the arrival of men—the first they have ever encountered—the world they know within barbed wire fences and overpowering rules strictly set to admonish them for their own safety and cleansing, unravel into a tense, internal struggle between what they know and what they desire.

The novel is as cryptic as it is sinister in its mental and emotional manipulation, the driving force in the success of its vicarious trauma. It is, however, entertainingly twisted in its ability to arouse an almost inevitable, compassionate fatigue in the reader by the depth of empathy and sorrow required in enduring the characters’ emotional and physical trauma.

The plot is subtly deceptive and the characters surreal in their naive, yet active obedience to dominant forms of power. Their internalized oppression is so heavily ingrained that what seems absurdly unthinkable to someone outside their context, is sufficiently unsettling, yet submitted to by a stronghold of palpable fear, severity, and self-inflicted denial.

The characters are so deeply dysfunctional that their tolerance of pain and self-inflicted suffering seem almost sadistically desired as an only known form of functionality, a conflicting force between unconsciously knowing their devastation, yet also systematically preserving it.

This book is dark as it is intriguing, a dramatic thriller of perturbed, classical conditioning at the cost of freedom, safety, love, and free will.

Readers will be painfully and aggressively disturbed, and emotionally charged by engaging in this novel because the Water Cure is as much a cure, as it is, its own disease.

***

Characters:  4 stars
Plot:  5 stars
Language/Narrative:  5 stars
Dialogue:  4 stars
Pacing: 4 stars
Cover Design:  5 stars

***

Rating

***

A special thanks to Penguin Random House Canada on behalf of Doubleday for providing me with a copy of The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh  in exchange for an honest and timely review.

***

About the Author:

Sophie Mackintosh won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta magazine and TANK magazine among others. The Water Cure is her first novel.

• From Goodreads

Links:

You can connect with the author, Sophie Mackintosh, on Twitter.

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