Tag: fiction

The Shoe Box Waltz: A Novel by Kathleen Patrick

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The Shoe Box Waltz: A Novel by Kathleen Patrick

The Shoe Box Waltz is the story of lives intertwined, each one shaped by the others it touches. Each of these lives is in turn shaped by single defining moments, a moment that we never expect to possess such impact. This is a novel of the power of such encounters, seemingly so fleeting and unimportant at the time, as they become amplified. While its author, Kathleen Patrick, labels this a psychological novel, I am inclined to class it as a literary fiction: character-centric and deeply reflective, rather than psychological in the academic or manipulative sense.

The novel revolves around a young woman, Cora, and takes us through three interlocking periods of her life: her youth, her childhood, and her adult life after a traumatic event. As she moves through these periods of her life, she encounters people whose decisions shape the course of her own experience: Nancy, Caitlyn, Maureen, and later, Ian and Ray. There is also an unnamed external narrator, perhaps a sentient persona in Cora’s subconscious. This reader found the novel to focus heavily on the experience of being a woman and the trials of womanhood; a topic I enjoy and appreciate as a woman. A note: Readers should be aware they may find elements of the novel triggering; but, as women generally know, a woman’s life in this patriarchal world is inherently fraught with trauma.

Divided in two parts, bifurcated as Cora’s life becomes, the reader is given a view into the inner perspectives of each of these individuals in Cora’s life, as well as a her own. Each chapter is narrated by a different individual, some also switch position from 1st to 2nd to 3rd, offering the reader a wholly different voice and understanding of Cora’s story. In some cases, the switch of perspective is jarring, but overall, the mechanism works to deliver an unusual reading experience.

Patrick’s prose is literary; thoughtful and evocative, stealthily drawing emotion from the reader. That said, some descriptions and phrases read poorly, dated, and somewhat cliché: “shapely legs” for instance, provides no real fleshy image for this reader. Despite this, I was compelled to read on, finishing the novel in the space of three days. Cora’s story — and Nancy’s intervention in it — was magnetic.

Readers who enjoy historical literary fiction, with a feminist tint, will be sure to find The Shoe Box Waltz a moving and emotional experience, well-worth the effort of reading it.

The Lover: A Short Story by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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The Lover: A Short Story
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Lover is the perfect short story for the winter season (which is not Christmas related). Readers who enjoy feminist retellings of fairy-tales or spins on classics will find The Lover deeply satisfying and empowering.

I read this as an audiobook, which is something new for me. I’m not good with audio. books; they tend to put me to sleep. but I gave this a go and found it an interesting experiences. Half way through this short story, I opted to return to physical reading. I think I enjoy the narration in my own voice rather than. someone else’s.

The tale is a fantasy combining Cinderella with Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, and something about Woodsmen that I am sure exists in some Grimm or folk literature. It revolves around two sisters and a young man who simultaneously comes between them and brings them together — albeit awkwardly. Like most traditional fairytales its ending deliver a moral message.

Moreno Garcia is well suited to this genre, her mastery of the gothic form and its creeping horror elevates this simple fairytale to the level of a modern horror, gore, sex, crime and all.

If you’re looking for some light entertainment with a wicked twist, The Lover if for you.

Silver Nitrate: A Novel by Silvia Moreno Garcia

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Silver Nitrate: A Novel by Silvia Moreno Garcia

Moreno-Garcia not only understood the assignment, she did the extra credit! Silver Nitrate delivered all that a modern gothic horror should: slow, building ripples of doubt and uncertainty (the kind that make your eyebrows knit and you second-guess yourself), a female lead whose existence is threatened, a feminist focus in which oppression of the social kind is the baseline terror, actual monsters and gory scenes.

Silver Nitrate as the title suggests, reads like a film noir played out in intimate, literary detail. It is a must-read for film fanatics and bookish folks, alike.

The story revolves around a young woman and her best-friend, a man she grew up with and who also ended up in the film industry, and the tension between them. Both become friends with an elderly man, a former director of Mexican horror and their connection with him develops into an interesting — but ultimately deadly — project. The result of their collaboration opens up histories best left buried and occult forces beyond their control. Madness and death ensues.

Like true gothic horror, the novel and the madness unravels slowly, and the focus of the novel is character-driven. The reader is given a first row view into the woman’s mind, her desires, her fears, her past and present, as she slides into a dark world that was hiding all along within the one we all know and live in. It is, as with most good novels, a story about us and what lurks within. Moreno-Garcia is a pithy mistress of the genre.

The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

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The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

This novel knocked the breath out of me. It’s a punchy, unabashed novel that does not hold back for the delicate senses of the reader. And that’s really its purpose: to strike, to aggressively announce blackness and the terrible history of being black in America.

The Nickel Boys are children and teens who have been sentenced to a juvenile detention center of the same name, a place that announces its purpose is rehabilitation and calls itself a school in name only. This is where the state of Florida shuts away its poor, young white and black boys. The novel follows a young man who, after seventeen years of successfully avoiding the racism roaming the streets in the form of cops, finds himself arrested and carted off to Nickel for his sentence. Here, he and reader have their eyes opened to the brutalities of being a black boy in a white man’s world.

Like Whitehead’s other novels, The Nickel Boys is written with an urban lyricism unique to him. The way Whitehead’s prose and story weaves in on itself, producing by the novel’s end, a symmetrical structure is deeply satisfying and alluring to this reader. Throughout the novel there are little hints at its ending, as if its ending was never — should never — be a surprise (though it is, and purposefully so). Whitehead is a master at unravelling just enough thread to keep the reader dangling, tying off all the knots at the end to zip it all up.

The Liberators: A Novel by E.J. Koh

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The Liberators: A Novel by E.J. Koh

The Liberators is a powerful punch of a novel packed into a mere 240 pages. With an economy of words, almost bordering on stinginess, Koh delivers full fleshed characters and a tragedy of relationships and history. This is a masterful work of historical fiction.

The novel revolves around two intertwined narratives, one historical and the other intimate. The division between North and South Korea is the constant thread of grief and loss that plays against a more personal tragedy in the form of a young couple’s romance, marriage, and slow death thereof as the husband and wife are separated through migration and tradition. Nation here becomes an actor itself; the North and the South, like siblings or lovers torn apart by foreign forces, growing in ever divergent directions. This parting is mimicked by the husband and wife, until at last reconciliation seems impossible.

Here is a complex interweaving of expectations and desires that become thwarted by forces of history and culture in ways that are beyond any individual’s control.

Alpha Bette: A Novel by Jennifer Robbins Manocherian

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Alpha Bette: A Novel by Jennifer Robbins Manocherian

I’m still not quite sure what to make of Bette, the eponymous protagonist of this novel, and I think that might have been the point. She’s definitely a character that sticks with you, someone you don’t really expect. Indeed, the quirky cast of characters is the primary draw of this novel; they’re ordinary, but uniquely so, and thereby, strangely unforgettable.

Alpha Bette revolves around Bette, the ancient matriarch of an urbane New York family, who, recently widowed, has been left to sputter out the rest of her life in an upscale apartment with her night nurse and daytime housekeeper. Her children, grandchildren, and great grand child are grown, living lives of their own without her. Bette wakes up one morning and decides she’s going to throw a dinner party. Over the course of the frantic day during which Bette and her housekeeper attempt to make all the necessary arrangements, Bette’s neighbors and others on the periphery of her life, present and past, are woven into the story and the dinner party plans.

The novel is about those encounters, the myriad of ways in which we connect — or don’t — with those closest around us, whether they are family, friends, employers, employees, neighbors, enemies, etc. The novel dregs up those age-old existential questions posing them in charming ways: What’s the point of this all? What really matters in the end?

Indeed, “charming” is the perfect descriptor for this piece of contemporary fiction. The characters — even the crotchety ones — are charming in their own ways. The story itself, charming. The life Bette lives and has lived, charming and charmed. All in all, this is an enjoyable, entertaining read with tangible, fleshy characters, some of whom you’ll like and some you’ll enjoy hating.

The Unsettled: A Novel by Ayana Mathis

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The Unsettled: A Novel
by Ayana Mathis

This novel gut-punched me in ways that only good novels can. I could feel tears sting along those nerves behind my eyes. Sometimes I felt my skin get sweat-clammy. The Unsettled unsettles, just like Mathis wants it to.

Right from the start, The Unsettled knocks you down and it doesn’t let up. Its breathless, relentless struggle, the way it forces the reader to keep grasping for relief mimics the feeling that its protagonists feel, trapped in a transient limbo of poverty and abuse and disappointment. This is a novel about what it is to be black and working class in urban America.

The novel revolves around a young boy and his mother, forced to live in temporary housing because of an abusive stepfather and husband, because of racist, classist inequities, because life has dealt them a harsh hand. The novel documents their life before and during their stay in this housing, the people they encounter there, at school, in their former and current neighborhoods. Interwoven between these grim chapters is the story of the mother’s past, her mother and a different world of an all-black enclave in the deep south. In this place too, there is the struggle for blackness to simply exist. The two stories are linked by several threads, the most salient of which is the structural oppression of blackness in America; both stories eventually merge into one, culminating in an explosive end.

Mathis writes with a machete, its edge as sharp as a scalpel. The prose in The Unsettled is blunt, straightforward, and will absolutely cut you down. But the pace of this beating does not exhaust; I was compelled to return to the book again and again until it was done with me (and not I done with it). Its characters were there with me, around me, so fleshy and tangible. I read mostly in bed, where I feel warm and safe, and there were more than a few times when I put down the book and nearly cried, wishing they did not have to live in such an unsafe, cold, grey place.

On the Way to the End of the World: A Novel by Adrianne Harun

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On the Way to the End of the World: A Novel by Adrianne Harun

I wanted to like this novel more than I actually did. Some parts of it utterly exhilarated, drove me on to the next page. Other parts dragged. Ultimately and sadly, many of the endings in the novel unravelled the tight twists of its mysteries into mere frayed ends.

But, that said, Harun’s prose and character building was phenomenal; I could almost feel their breath in the air as I read. For readers who enjoy the gossip and politics of living in a small town, this is the novel for you. The tensions were real and tight and very appealing.

The premise of the story, while it falls flat, is an intriguing one. The novel centers on a strange community building exercise instigated by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, exhorting citizens to walk fifty miles within twenty hours. This brainchild, the Kennedy March, is the event which brings together an odd collection of a Pacific Northwest’s townsfolk: boy scouts, middle and high school students, a widow, the town’s telephone operator, and a mish-mash of others. It is an informal, poorly organized march, mapped out for the participants and then nothing — they are left to navigate the route on their own.

What occurs during those twenty hours is what draws them together, asks them confront and perhaps reconcile the restlessness of their personal trajectories, forces them to look upon one another with suspicion. The rag-tag group encounter secrets along their march and in doing so must sort out who they think they really are.

Embedded in their adventure are the misadventures of others in their town. It is here that I was disappointed. There are mysterious lures… there is the promise — actually several — of scandal and thrill, but the story never fully resolves those mysteries, abandons them. I read on hoping that the novel would return to those threads, but it didn’t. At least not to my satisfaction.

Nonetheless, an intriguing and character-centric read, one that will please fans of literary fiction.

The Shamshine Blind: A Novel by Paz Pardo

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The Shamshine Blind: A Novel
by Paz Pardo

I absolutely love love LOVE this novel. That said, it took me four attempts to actually become immersed in it. My first attempt told me that this was a gorgeously written novel; I could tell immediately that the prose is sharp, precise as a scalpel, so on point that one could cut diamonds with these words. But my mind wasn’t in the right place; I couldn’t focus on the investigation, my mind wandered. It happened again on the second and third attempts.

And yet, I refused to give up on this novel. I shelved it, but I kept picking it up. I knew something good was in it, but my head wasn’t in the right space. Could there be some truth behind Pardo’s emotion counts? Do feelings linger in the atmosphere?

My fourth plunge into this novel was as deep as I could get. I finished it in two and half days, prolonged because work interrupted my reading.

This novel is everything a reader could possibly want. The Shamshine Blind is amazingly original in its concept and delivery, even while it builds on the roman noir, hard-boiled detective trope. Its guts make it a mystery and thriller, but the prose that flows is literary liquid.

Its landscape is foreign and familiar, its world is one of speculative fiction; the setting is 2009 in an alternate reality where the Argentines won the war against the United Kingdom for the Falkland Islands — the Malvinas — and then went on to decimate the rest of the world. The Argentines’ weapon of mass destruction was a work of chemical genius: capturing emotion and concentrating it into a deadly debilitating bullet. The science didn’t stop there and in this reality society must now grapple with mind-altering drugs, psychopigments, which alter our emotions, our reactions and responses, our behavior. “Your Emotions Are Not Your Own” is a warning repeated in the novel.

Kay Curtida is the detective put on a psychopigment case, a homicide — which, when its layers are peeled away, reveals something much larger and far more corrupting than simple murder is at foot.

And I’ll leave you hanging there. Go read it.

The Wind Knows My Name: A Novel by Isabel Allende

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The Wind Knows My Name: A Novel by Isabel Allende

I have never read anything by Isabel Allende before this novel. I know she’s a well-known, well-respected author, critically acclaimed and with a string of best-sellers. I just hadn’t come across her books before — and so, when I got the chance to read this, I was thrilled to!

The novel is a historical and contemporary work of literary fiction; weaving together multiple, seemingly disparate threads, across time and distance. This is a story of multigenerational, intergenerational trauma and the power of found family, the connections we build through shared experience and history. The novel begins with a young boy, left bereft by World War II and the holocaust, then segues into the latter end of the 20th century, refocusing on a young woman whose own life was torn apart by political and real warfare in El Salvador. The paths of these two individuals merge together in 2017 when the United States begins its policy of deporting refugees and refusing asylum to those at the Mexican-US border.

This is a harrowing story, one designed to evoke an emotional response, to serve as an act of resistance and resilience, a political statement and work of activism. It delivers on all these points.

To meet the novel’s objectives, Allende writes simply. The language is straightforward and direct, with little metaphor or room for interpretation; it is accessible in order to reach diverse readers. The prose possesses a determined clarity, one which all readers will appreciate. But readers should not confuse simplicity for lack of depth; Allende’s writing is emotionally charged, it reveals a deep awareness of human frailty and response to trauma.

It is this reader’s opinion that few readers will able to walk away from this novel unmoved by its content and message.