Tag: Literature

The Tragedy of Medusa: A Novel by H.M. Roberts

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The Tragedy of Medusa: A Novel by H.M. Roberts

At under 200 pages, The Tragedy of Medusa is deceptively thin. H.M. Roberts delivers a powerful and emotional alternate narrative to the myth of this complicated woman through a swiftly moving story and with a succinct use of words.

Readers should know that the novel spans the length of a lifetime, and will immerse them thoroughly in its magical timeline. I emerged from the novel feeling a kind of grief; as if I had lived alongside the woman, Medusa, herself. Having a familiarity with the original myth of Medusa is not required here; Roberts uses the mythology as a guide, but deviates from its rules to develop a compelling, deeply human tale. Through Roberts’ prose and storytelling I lived the tragedy of Medusa myself.

Readers who enjoy historical fiction, fantasy, and mythology will appreciate Roberts’ equal attention to research and reality on one hand, magic and lore on the other. As a historian and as a pleasure-reader, I appreciated how well-researched it was without being pedantic. Small details about dress and life brought a tangibility to the interactions between characters, put the story in historical context. But the novel remained focused on its story and characters, and this is ultimately what made it so compelling: Medusa, her sisters, and family were nuanced, imperfect and human, for all their divine origin, the mortal characters transcended time, feeling all too familiar despite the historical difference. Fans of literary fiction will find the deep reflection and well-crafted characters of this novel as appealing as story. Roberts’ The Tragedy of Medusa cuts across the boundaries of genre.

I thoroughly enjoyed this indie read, and would not hesitate to recommend this to other readers.

The River We Remember: A Novel by William Kent Krueger

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The River We Remember: A Novel by William Kent Krueger

As a reader, we all yearn for those novels that truly take us to another moment in time and hold us there until we feel like our own world is strange. We are lost when we return to our reality, feeling a little fuzzy in the head. I felt that way with this novel.

The River We Remember is a historical murder mystery, a story that is almost a cliché: the cowboy-like detective of a small, rural town, embroiled in the politics and corruption that all small towns seem to have and own proudly, must cut through all that to discover the truth. Along the way he has to confront his own loyalties, his own foibles, his own prejudices. He’s a flawed human being. Indeed, that’s part of Krueger’s skill here as a story-teller. His characters are fleshy, flawed beings, each with their own set of ambitions and darkness.

The River We Remember documents the seediness of life in a small town that looks perfect and serene on the exterior. That’s the kind of atmosphere Krueger builds here. Exposure of what lies in the shade. The crime rips away the comfort of that darkness, makes everything come into the glaring light.

The brilliance of the story aside, Krueger’s prose and dialogue, both the internal reflection of its protagonist and what is voiced, creates a lively world. Readers can almost hear the breath of the characters as they brush past the invisible reader in their midst.

Speech Team: A Novel by Timothy Murphy

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Speech Team: A Novel
by Timothy Murphy

I picked up this book by chance, walking past it in my local public library. I know we’re not “supposed” to judge books by their covers, but I do. When I turned the inner flap to read the synopsis, I knew immediately I had to read it.

The premise is that a member of a high school debate team commits suicide later in life, and a former team mate and friend sees this on social media. In the suicide post left behind, is an accusation against the teacher who ran the debate team, that he had said some awful things. What follows is a series of enlightening conversations between the surviving friends, revealing that all the team mates experienced some kind of denigrating treatment at the hands of the debate teacher.

As an educator, I know that the words I say have an incredible impact on my students, for the better and for the worse, though I hope for the former. Sometimes I say things I wish I had said differently, or not at all. The semester before I read Speech Team I had a student breakdown in my office during a private meeting. They were debilitatingly afraid of submitting their assignments to me, for fear that I’d be disappointed. They told me that in middle school, they overheard a teacher telling someone else how disappointed the teacher was in them, thinking that the subject wouldn’t hear. The teacher had expected more of my student and was complaining to another person. It cut deep and my student never forgot it, and it ruined their experience of school forever.

The story is supported by Murphy’s excellent prose. Like most literary fiction, it is deeply introspective and thoughtful in its content and approach. Murphy excavates what has become a quotidian trauma — the rod-wielding nun, the grouchy math teacher, the demanding and unyielding debate team teacher — drawing out complex feelings, leading to even more complex and perplexing actions/reactions. Readers will find a piece of themselves in these characters, perhaps more than one.

This is an extraordinary tale of an ordinary epiphany: what happens when we discover there is more than one authentic version of our past, sometimes hidden from ourselves by ourselves, and that the view of it looks different from other angles and through other eyes. That sometimes it takes time to understand our traumas.

Speech Team struck a nerve. I couldn’t put it down. I had to know what happened. If you’re a teacher of any kind, read this, and re-read it.

The Bandit Queens: A Novel by Parini Shroff

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The Bandit Queens: A Novel
by Parini Shroff

I absolutely loved reading this book. Every twist, every shift of the story was both unpredictable and comfortably familiar. It was gratifying. I won’t give it away, but I found myself saying, “I knew it!” and “Oh, noooooo!” equally as frequently.

The story unfolds in a small rural Indian village (a fact about it I love; too often the novels I’ve read of India focus on the urban experience) and revolves around a woman whose husband has vanished under mysterious circumstances. The villagers suspect nefarious reasons and the woman is ostracized as a witch, though nominally included in a number of village activities, including a micro-financing program run by one of several foreign NGOs.

As the women become empowered through their new wealth and skills, they find themselves unwilling to bow to the patriarchal norms of Indian culture and so they seek out the witch in their midst to help rid themselves of their problems in the way they imagine she did.

Mayhem and hilarity ensue. Vengeance too. And redemption. Really, this novel has it all.

Shroff’s prose is another worthy reason to pick up this novel. Her voice is clear, bell-like and unique; her voice as an author, like the the women she writes is individual. The prose is confident and bold, clear and evocative. In several parts, Shroff touches too close to the reality of being a woman in a patriarchal society. I twinged when I read those words, both out of appreciation at being seen and discomfort, being confronted with the fact that women are universally abused.

I especially appreciated Shroff’s portrayal of rural Indian women. The characters here are fleshy women who disrupt the stereotype of the unworldly, uneducated, unintelligent village woman. This is a work of decolonization, unravelling the orientalist stereotype too many Indian women have — and are — burdened with.

I cannot wait for Shroff’s next book.

The Librarianist: A Novel by Patrick deWitt

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The Librarianist: A Novel by Patrick deWitt

The setting of the novel and its title intrigued me; it’s set in Portland, OR, near where I live and I love books and libraries. Is this a book about books? About loving reading? About libraries?

No, it isn’t. It isn’t about any of that, not at all.

If there is any relation to books at all, it is that the novel is about the chapters that make up the narratives of our lives. Well, Bob Comet’s life, to be specific. Bob is a quiet man, a retired and retiring kind of man, who becomes entangled in the drama and lives of the residents of a kind of retirement home near his own. While there, his interactions with the attendants and residents force him to reconsider the trajectory and decisions of his own life.

In the course of his discoveries about himself, he finds he must witness a direction his life did not take, a love lost and unrecovered.

The Librarianist is a melancholy glimpse into life and its traumas, large and small. This novel makes me think of rain in the Pacific Northwest: ever-present and daily probable, quietly dripping dripping dripping, a small cluster of molecules that is incredibly important to life. Like rain, the quotidian in The Librarianist is vital. The life that unfolds in this novel reminds me of the verdant luxury of green in moss, pine, conifer that emerges after the flush of rain.

Readers who love Stoner by John Williams or Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov will appreciate the life deWitt writes for us.

In the Upper Country: A Novel by Kai Thomas

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In the Upper Country: A Novel
by Kai Thomas

I was very excited to read this, and it did not disappoint. In The Upper Country offers readers a new perspective, one of many histories, of the Underground Railroad, and the people who traversed it, were borne out of it. This is a story about ancestry and descending, the diverse and convergent ways in which histories flow, often beyond our control and understanding.

Several stories, seemingly disparate, come together here to bring a fleshiness to a spectral kind of history.

The story is set in Dunmore, a town in Canada were black people who have escaped slavery can be free — and yet, of course, not, living as they are within a white world. An event shakes the town, the criminal refuses to be cowed and the result is a tense struggle between generations to grapple with North American chattel slavery and the concept of freedom. The result is a portrayal of the tragically disjointed and yet deeply connected lives of black slaves and free blacks. Lensinda was born free. But she must still live with the past. The past must learn how to reconcile itself.

This is the kind of story that must be read and re-read, the reader accepting that with each re-reading a different understanding of the characters and their ideas of freedom and bondage will become visible.

Caught In A Still Place: A Novel by Jonathan Lerner

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Caught In A Still Place:
A Novel by Jonathan Lerner

I enjoyed this short novel so much I bought a copy for my cousin for Christmas! For readers interested in environmental fiction, literary fiction, and poignant, reflection, Caught In A Still Place delivers on all points. This novel deserves a come-back.

The story revolves around a small community, reeling from some kind of environmental and social fall out. The world has come to an end. Not the end, for people continue to live, though not as they used to. For this small enclave of neighbors in Florida, they are learning to manage. This is the tale of how they begin to navigate the same needs and desires in new circumstances, new contexts; humanity has changed, humanity remains the same. This is a story about how everything and nothing changes.

As a reader, I am left wanting more — but I do not think this is a detraction. Rather, this left me feeling immersed in the lives of its characters. I felt like the characters must feel at the end of each day: a little hopeful, mostly uncertain, but inevitably alive.

The Magpie Funeral: A Novella by Adam Galanski-De León

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The Magpie Funeral: A Novella by Adam Galanski-De León

A short, but poignant and profoundly moving story about family and the spaces between us that we must navigate, the narratives we tell ourselves and others, the ways in we lose our connections to one another. There are many ways to read The Magpie Funeral, many ways to interpret the events and the silences the characters leave behind.

This is one of the strengths of the novella; its ability to mean different things to different readers.

On its surface, this is a story about a man trying to connect to his heritage, his roots, by seeking out a grandfather who abandoned his family. The man is searching for an answer to some missing piece of his life. This is the story of what he finds and the people he encounters along that path.

This is a very literary novel, one that mimics life and its harsh realities. Readers who seek coziness and comfort should expect to have their hopes dashed. Reader who enjoy realism and the unpredictability of reality will be intrigued by the novella’s turns. Readers who enjoy reflection will encounter a myriad of emotions as the characters — lifelike as they are — are not the perfectly self-aware beings we might wish them to be. Readers will experience some form of loss in reading this book, a performative element of the story itself.

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.