Maryanne’s own sense of self in relation to her overbearing mother and Freya’s sense of self in relation to Maryanne are handled with such richness that they give the story a great deal of depth, even as it pushes towards its inevitable outcome. The Restorer is a beautifully written and very powerful fiction that not only shines a light on the deep roots of domestic violence but also plays with the line of what remains in the face of such destruction. Sala’s story that will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
Strange Migrations: on the novel Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
For the cast of characters the present has no meaning. They are suspended between the places they have left and a fantasy of a future home. These are the superimpositions of images that color their thoughts, their dreams, and their narratives – the binaries of home and abroad, the past and the future, the real and fantasy.
A review of The Golden Child by Wendy James
The plot moves fast, the narrative driving the reading towards its final unnerving twist. It all happens almost too quickly. James’ writing is so smooth, and the story so powerfully plotted, that its easy to miss how neatly the shifts are between the individual voices, the many delicate links between cause and effect and the parallels between adults and children as we move from one character to another, the way the reader is unwittingly drawn into the toxic culture of privilege that underpins these characters, or how subtle the thematics.
A review of Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher and Anger and the Indigo Child by dianne Lancaster
n Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher the main character is a person. And since he’s not a real person on earth that we’ll be able to find, he’s living on another earth exactly the same as ours. In fact, you are living on another earth exactly the same as ours. He earns this, as does the writing because it’s him.
A review of Hope Farm by Peggy Frew
Hope Farm is an exquisite and powerful book that explores the gaps between desire, societal norms, and love, loss, and memory. Both Silver and Ishtar’s story is deeply affecting, and as full of beauty as it is of verisimilitude.
A review of Wild Gestures by Lucy Durneen
The language is silky and seductive and as a reader I was drawn in, drifting about like a leaf in a stream taking in sights, sounds and feelings. Lucy Durneen leaves the door open to her mind and as the pages pass I’m looking out of her eyes focusing and feeling the world as she describes and experiences it.
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Jennifer Maiden on Play With Knives
Poet and novelist Jennifer Maiden drops by to read from her latest novel Play With Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker, and to talk about all three novels in the Play With Knives series, about the joy…
A review of the Play with Knives trilogy by Jennifer Maiden
All three novels explore guilt and innocence, good and evil, and the individual versus the state or government, using changing tense and viewpoints. The grand conception is fairly ambitious, but Maiden handles it all smoothly and the stories read like ordinary thrillers. The binaries that charge these books are played with in all sorts of interesting ways as the characters swap positions, power matrices, emotional landscapes, and unravel the structures in which they work.
A review of So Much Smoke by Felix Calvino
Always there’s a sense that the world is not quite fixed and that what we’re experiencing is illusory (so much smoke), and charged by scars, memories, hunger, and all that we’ve lost. The stories that make up So Much Smoke are powerful, not so much because of what happens, but because of the way they hint at how much lurks below the surface