Purge by Sofi Oksanen

Review by Sharon Samuel

Harper Paperbacks, 2010

With gripping suspense and graphic honesty, Sofi Oksanen breathes life into “a world of brittle paper [and] moldy old albums emptied of pictures,” to create a tapestry where past meets present, and the shadow of war stands starkly against the prospect of peace. In her debut novel Purge, Oksanen explores various forms of loss—loss of innocence, of freedom, of national pride, and of love—in a manner that demonstrates the depth of human resilience.

Purge centers on the elderly Aliide Truu and her charge Zara, who turns up at Aliide’s unassuming home in Estonia, bloodied and desperately seeking refuge from her former life as a sex slave. Though their paths appear to intersect coincidentally, Oksanen slowly reveals the disturbing connection between the two women through a series of flashbacks.

The novel begins in the year 1992, when Aliide and Zara engage in their cryptic dialogue and the older woman struggles to open herself up to the younger. Oksanen then abruptly introduces the Estonia of the Soviet era, during which Aliide learns to live quietly and simply under the heavy hand of the government. The reader is also transported to Zara’s past. Succumbing to the allure of earning money in Western Europe, Zara leaves her home and lands in her captors’ snare.

The suffering that both women endure may cause readers to redefine, and certainly to broaden, their perception of rape—that is, what it means to be robbed of physical and psychological purity, and to be humiliated to the point where security can only be found in distrust. Oksanen’s vivid language exposes the atrocities committed under the USSR through the lens of a feminine world altogether intimate, nurturing and tragic.

At the same time, Purge is a story about storytelling; Oksanen’s choppy format creates apprehension in the reader, as it becomes increasingly clear that there is more to Aliide and Zara than they are willing to divulge initially. By deliberately holding back key pieces of information and moving the reader in and out of layers of time, Purge is truly an adventure in itself.

Ultimately, what Oksanen has achieved is a multilayered drama about the vitality of the Estonian spirit. Certain characters seem to personify disappointment in the Allied response to their plight; and yet, despite the imminence of physical and spiritual death in post-World War II Europe, such darkness is eclipsed by the magnificence of survival.

Based Upon Availability by Alix Strauss

Review by Mayra David

Harper Paperbacks, 2010

A hotel is the perfect setting for Strauss’ characters; eight women passing through the lobby and rooms of an impressive and impersonal hotel. Like hotel rooms, bodies may come with standard fixtures, and one can never tell who is living inside. The characters in this book feel free in their own heads, as they do in their hotel rooms, to wallow in their neuroses, fetishes, and poisonous feelings just as long as the outside world doesn’t notice. A hotel room can always be wiped clean of a person’s presence, their mess; nobody cares about their pain.

Strauss’ doesn’t flinch at all when taking first one, then another woman under a magnifying glass. While I think it is brave to tackle such psyches head on, I quickly felt disinterested in her main character, Morgan, the hotel’s manager, who gets the first few chapters of the book. Morgan, bereft by her sister’s death nearly 25 years ago, is a dispirited, destructive person – monotonously so. She regularly enters occupied hotel rooms and tries on guests’ clothes, takes their beauty products and prescription medication. It’s not a simple case of sticky fingers. Rather, it seems she is trying to penetrate their privacy, getting to know them in the way she wishes somebody would do with her, force a connection with her, and bring her back to life.

The succeeding chapters each deal with one of the other seven women and we don’t get back to Morgan till the very end. Here, Strauss hits her stride. The other characters are just as richly developed, if not more so. They have more interesting quirks and stories. Anne, for example, a borderline (she confirmed online) obsessive-compulsive concierge, was both frightening and entertaining all at the same time. Not entertaining in her OCD ways, but entertaining in that she goes beyond the walls of the hotel: into the city, on a date arranged online. And Trish: The back of the book will tell you she is consumed with envy for her newly skinny, newly engaged best friend. But that hardly begins to describe the bundle of pain and aspiration this woman seems to be.

With a plot, this could have been a great novel. The elements are there: great characterization, crisp writing. But instead the book is really a collection of short stories that uses Morgan as a thread to function as a novel. Generally this works very well, though at times it feels forced. The strongest thread through these stories is really the uniformity in their voices. Though heard from different points of view, it’s the same voice whether it’s being told from the first person or a close third person. Even the unusual second person perspective is an ill-conceived notion in this case.

The other women are well-developed in varying degrees. Strauss is a skilled writer, that much is clear. She knows how to create a person on a page. If only she had given them room to breathe, perhaps asked Morgan to move over a little and make some room for the other lovely, lonely, damaged women.

Butterfly Tears, Stories by Zoe S. Roy

Review by Rose Gold

Inanna Publications, 2009

Butterfly Tears is a collection of fifteen short stories which oscillate between China and North America. Through memories, dreams, dialogue and the sparing use of symbol, these short stories speak of the almost unendurable hardship suffered in the “Cultural Revolution” of Mao’s China as well as the shock and bewilderment experienced by Chinese immigrants in North America as they struggle to come to terms with the new world they have found themselves in and the loss of the old world they have left behind.

The stories are simply told and move effectively and seamlessly through time and place. Throughout the pieces, we are given sometimes glimpses and sometimes enduring images of a lost world, of a new world as seen through the immigrants’ eyes, and of the relationships caught between both worlds. It is intriguing to learn about the Cultural Revolution in China and to see how ruinous and stultifying those years were. At times it is almost hard to believe the extent to which individual freedoms were suppressed. In several stories, public denunciations occur. In “Ten Yuan”, for instance, a man is denounced for telling a joke, and in Twin Rivers, a woman denounces her own husband. The paralyzing fear of the regime is an ever-present undercurrent in these stories, and some scenes seem almost prototypical of Orwell’s 1984.

There is a distinct feminine and feminist perspective in the stories. Many of them deal with women who cast off traditional values – Confucian or Maoist – to begin a new life in North America where they must confront unexpected challenges and troubles in family relationships. In “Butterfly Tears”, for instance, childhood memories of a crazed old man abandoned by his wife, entwine with an old Chinese myth of thwarted love and with disturbing dreams to torment a woman who is about to separate from her husband.

While later stories deal with the conflicts and fortunes in the relationships of Chinese women who struggle to adapt to North American society, many of the early stories take place in Mao’s China. One of these, “Yearning”, is an effective and gripping tale of escape from Communist China, and in “Frog Fishing” a very realistic and sickening denunciation is portrayed. “Twin Rivers”, straddling both worlds, is an effective story of jealousy, revenge and shame, which echoes and reflects an earlier tragedy.

This collection offers the reader many captivating cameos of the Chinese/North American experience as seen through women’s eyes. The stories are believable and direct and do not fail to engage the reader with their weave of dream, memory and often surprising turns of fate. Especially intriguing are the stories and scenes set in Mao’s China, which give us a rare glimpse in to the dark and frightening world of the Cultural Revolution, the totalitarian nightmare which in some way or another haunts every one of these stories.

Zoe S. Roy was born in China and was an eyewitness to the Red Trror under Mao’s regime. Her short fiction has appeared in several Canadian magazines. She currently lives in Toronto where she works as an adult educator and writer.

Apparition Wren by Maureen Aslop

Review by Metta Sáma

Main Street Rag, 2007

We’re often trained to think of titles as the entryway to the poem; after all, it’s the first thing the eyes (are supposed to) land on when first encountering a poem. Some of us (renegades that we are) choose to save the poem for last or to meet it somewhere in the middle of our reading, a sly glance upwards that says “hmmmmm. . . now what is this poem doing?” Sometimes the title is a place-holder, sometime it’s a key to the workings of the poet’s mind. In Maureen Alsop’s debut book, Apparition Wren, the title of the collection works as the latter.

Alsop’s poems are wicked, irreverent, often tender with a sly edge; yes, sometimes they’re abundant in their play, and she goes after this decadent language with intense vigor. They very often perform as the title of the collection performs, as a little mystery with logic built in: what is an apparition wren? Is it similar to an apparition of wrens? Is it the apparition of a wren? Is it the voice of someone startled who accidentally left “of” out of the equation? Is it a child speaker? A dialect? I’m still not sure, but I certainly enjoy the topsy-turvy smashed up world the title (and the poems themselves) toss me into.

In “Autobiography of Fresh Oil” Alsop takes on the voice and attitude of oil that has seemingly lain itself on a road and is interrupted by a farmer, who drives his tractor over the oil. Of course, this angers the oil, after all, it’d lain itself out to be sunned!

Where the oiled road tapered into a bend
past shaded oak, I flat
lay myself on it. I burn
under the gravel sun. Until

a tractor come: he, farmer
of cornfield, say Fuck; yes (1-6)

The poem takes many a surreal turn and the voice of oil becomes muddled, less slick, abbreviated, and damaged: “I want/to enter him into me in repulsive way”, “But//blank my speak”, “A breeze//punish me”, “Later, I squeal//to the good doctor” (17-18, 21-22, 25-26, 31-32). Eventually, the oil “come[s] to know/nothing/of [it] self” (43-45). This is Alsop’s Apparition Wren at its core: ever-turning, ever-searching, ever-leaping.

In the oft-quoted poem “Daguerreotype Portrait of Woman and Bird” (itself a mine-field of style and tone, attitude and experiment (beginning with a six-line stanza on one page, moving to a 3-stanza 11-line poem on the next page, a 4-stanza 16-line poem on the next page, and followed by two pages of stanzas that alternate from solid structures to shifty foundations)), Alsop throws in 8 lines (3 stanzas) of backward slash marks to indicate “thinned ink” that had been “cramped” on paper:

// //////// //// //
//// // /// ////// /////

///////// /// //// / ///// ///// /////// ////////
//// /// //////// / /// ///// //////

/// /////////,
//////////////////////////
/////////////////////////
//////////////////////// (42-49).

I had the great pleasure of meeting Maureen Alsop recently. We took a walk together and laughed at the funny names of plants and agreed that poetry, often, is the intense desire to laugh with and play with language, to interrogate it, to twist it and sharpen our tongues on it. Apparition Wren, with its multiple voices, its attention to detail, and its hybridity of contemporary languages and archaic diction certainly masters the art of poetry that makes one want to work hard to get to the heart of every word.

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O’Connor McNees

Review by Rhianon Huot

Amy Einhorn Books
Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010

Kelly O’Connor McNee’s The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott poses the question, “She taught us how to love … But who taught her?” This novel, based on Little Women, Louisa’s journals, letters, and biographies of Louisa’s life, is an imagining of an unfulfilled romance. The author chose a summer of Louisa’s life which has few historical facts attached to it.

The year is 1855 in Walpole, New Hampshire. Louisa meets a Joseph Singer, who she falls for deeply, but doesn’t wish to surrender her life and self for.

The dialogue is moved forward skillfully with lines from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the first edition of which came out the very year of the Alcotts’ vacation to Walpole. Whitman’s poetry brings your mind into a magical and romantic state as it moves the protagonist further into love’s arms. It’s quite likely Louisa herself was familiar with Whitman, as her father was good friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a staunch supporter of his.

The Lost Summer draws on many of Little Women’s themes to assemble sketches of Louisa and her family’s life, so it may appeal to lovers of Little Women. In Little Women, Jo did not truly love her beau, Laurie, in The Lost Summer, Louisa loves Joseph deeply but chooses not to be with him.

McNees tries to show us Louisa’s mind, and we’re given many reasons as to why the affair cannot be fully realized. However, it remains difficult to understand the reasoning behind Louisa’s choice of solitude. She is constantly referring to housework, specifically the laundry, that would have to be done in a domestic partnership.

Her views on marriage seem black and white, and not quite feminist in particular. For where has her sense of choice disappeared to? Can she not live in a happy marriage of compromise, as the character of Joseph promises her?

With light having been shed on the many internal dialogues and struggles that Louisa’s character has, it’s easy to imagine these very conflicts may have plagued Alcott during her real life. In the end we see her looking back on her life, perhaps a bit regretfully, but proud of the work she has accomplished.

The Flat On Malabar Hill by Chitra Kallay

Review by Mayra David

iUniverse, 2009

One family, one story; seven voices, seven lives. In this beautifully written novel, Chitra Kallay explores that great tension between being the individual versus being a part of a whole. It may seem like a single, straightforward idea, but this idea is so well-explored in the the novel that it reveals within it culture clashes, generation gaps, societal inequities, and family – in particular marital – dynamics. It contains the notion that not only are we individuals, but we are always part of a greater entity; our individual actions are always part of a bigger picture. In a word: karma.

The Flat on Malabar Hill is a portrait of a prominent Mumbai family, centered around and headed by Vinod and Shanti. They have two sons, Kishore and Dev, as different from each other as two men can be: one succeeding in all aspects of life, where the other fails. One equally comfortable in India and the United States, the other not even comfortable in his own skin.

The novel switches perspectives between the seven family members, starting with Shanti as she visits Kishore’s home after the birth of her first grandson. Kishore and his wife Anjali have just moved back from the United States to rear their child in India, where his parents are eager to help. To him, this is not only the custom, it is the ideal. So the story begins with the gulf between Shanti and her daughter-in-law Anjali; though they are both Indian, they are two mothers from different times and backgrounds. This, Shanti’s first visit with her grandson, sets the tone for the rest of the novel: expectation, disappointment, unintended cruelty, private humiliation, and strong hope are the constant currents that run throughout the various relationships of this family. And just like the unstable electrical current that powers their houses in Mumbai, their interactions lead to inevitable blow outs.

Though the themes and situations here will certainly resonate with people from any ethnic background, the characters live and breathe their Indian culture. The heat and humidity, the sticky crowds and hot food, the luxurious lifestyles enabled by those in poverty all color as well as drive this novel. Kallay bravely leads the reader into the world of this family, unapologetic for its jarring character and yet ever mindful to explain its customs and scenery. This doesn’t make anything less exotic, but more exciting. The more we know of Mumbai the more intrigued we are by her; however much we get to know the family members, they still surprise us in their thoughts and actions. This continues all the way to the powerful end of the novel which we acutely sense to be neither the beginning nor the end of this family’s story, merely part of their karma.

Fragile Beasts by Tawni O’Dell

Review by Mary Harwood

Crown, 2010

A rich, eccentric old woman who keeps a vicious bull in her pasture. Two teen-aged boys who have lost their father in an horrific car accident fueled by alcohol and abandoned by their mother. When these two worlds collide, long-kept secrets break open old scars.

The story starts with Candace Jack as a young woman begging for the life of the bull that has just fatally gored her lover, the great matador El Soltero. Death becomes a theme that runs through each character’s plot line. Candace has never stopped mourning El Soltero and keeps her home as a shrine to him. She decorates with bullfighting posters and has a Spanish cook/houseman, Luis, who serves almost exclusively Spanish cuisine. In her pasture, she keeps a giant, perfect specimen of a bull, the offspring of Calladito, the bull who killed Soltero yet she saved from the ignoble death outside of the ring. As we learn from El Soltero, there are only two ways for a bullfighter to die: “in the ring and out of the ring.” Candace believes the same is true for great bulls. She breeds new bulls from Calladito’s sperm, cultivating the one offspring that most matches his fire. But otherwise, she remains remote in her home, purposefully cut off from the world.

Kyle and Klint, the two teenagers, are dealing with the death of their father in very different ways. Kyle wants to be an artist. His brother is a gifted baseball player. Two sons of a beer-guzzling janitor – the favorite son is easy to predict. However, Klint speaks little throughout the book yet looms over his brother’s story as well as Candace Jack’s. Shelby, Candace’s neice, has a crush on Klint and Kyle has a crush on her. Shelby comes up with a plan to keep the boys from moving to Arizona to live with their mother, who really doesn’t want them. She convinces her aunt to take them in. Candace is reluctant at first, but when challenged by the boys’ mother, she handles it by literally paying for them and becoming their legal guardian.

In some ways, the plot is predictable. Lonely, eccentric rich woman takes in two orphaned boys from the wrong side of the tracks and opens up, takes them as her own children she never had. However, it goes beyond the hackneyed to incorporate unexpected twists of painful secrets and unexpected loves. Interwoven with rich scenes of the world of the bullring (in part through letters from El Soltero’s grandnephew, now a famous bullfighter), Kyle’s blossoming as an artist and Klint’s retreat into himself are the stories of the two men who have loved, and kept, in their way, Candace for almost 60 years – Luis, the houseman and cook and Bert, her lawyer who sends yellow roses like clockwork.

This is a wonderfully crafted novel that also teaches us lessons in how to live and how to die. In the end, the fragile beasts are not bulls – they are us.

Notes from The Red Zone by Christina Pacosz

Review by Leslie Hayertz

Number 1: The Seven Kitchens
Press ReBound Series, 2009

I first reviewed Notes from The Red Zone, Christina Pacosz’s gem of a chapbook from Seal Press, in the Fall 1983 issue of Calyx. Now, almost twenty-seven years later, I revisit these eight poems, pleased that they have found new life on fresh pages as the first chapbook in The Seven Kitchens Press ReBound Series.

In Notes from The Red Zone, Pacosz observes life near the Hanford Site, a 586-square-mile nuclear reservation adjacent to Richland, Washington. The fact that Hanford’s nine reactors have since been decommissioned does not, unfortunately, date the book. Fifty-three million gallons of high-level radioactive waste make Hanford the most contaminated site in the United States. A commercial nuclear power plant and several research centers continue to operate there.

Poet David Chorlton, in his forward to the new edition, speaks to the chapbook’s continuing political and ecological relevance. He also praises Pacosz’s work for the “breadth of her view” and her “universal compassion.” It is precisely these qualities that have kept the poems in my heart and the original book on my shelf all these years.

Notes from The Red Zone is more than a mere collection of poems. Its recurring images and themes, and its controlled, forward movement make for a journey.

The setting takes us far from Washington’s iconic rain forests and mountain peaks to a flat, semi-arid landscape dominated by the Columbia River.

In Poem 1 and 2, in few words and with strong images, Pacosz takes us firmly by the hand into that desert place. She gives us the terrain, sets the tone: “…Skunks forage beneath locust trees / buzzing and clattering / in a deadly wind,” as well as introduces the issue of contamination: “…plutonium / uranium isotopes / lapping at my feet…”

In Poem 3: “…where the mesas strain / to come together / and make the hard land whole again.” Pacosz expresses a longing for health and wholeness and the inevitable veering away from the heart’s desire. Then, moving away from the river, to job and town, she lets us see deeply into the lives of the people caught there. Poems 3 and 4 are about the fear you don’t speak of. The men have separated themselves from the land, poisoned and exploited it. The women are trapped. Poem 4:

These women walk, sit, gaze

over caged hearts.

But the women are also complicit, trying to make a life by denying the danger, by not speaking the truth. Poem 4: “…A mute chorus they lament / the nuclear horse on their doorstep…”

Poems 5 and 6 speak of a culture gone astray and its men adrift. Turning their backs on wholeness has created fragmentation and emptiness:

They toss beer bottles at the stars

of some other.

Pacosz captures a place and people eerily well. She is as adept writing about human frailty as about the fragility of nature, and does both with pity and grace. In Poem 6, the poet describes a mallard duck mounting a female: “…She spreads her orange feet in the mud. / her breast, with its swift, small heart / rests on the earth…”

And then Poem 7 brings a whisper of hope, and 8 leads us away from the geographic

“Red Zone” in Eastern Washington and into ourselves with a cautionary and cautious meditation on the heart and the “other”: “…Given time, the heart / could contemplate the enormity, / purify the blood, the word…”

In the years to come, when I pick up Notes from the Red Zone, I’m sure it will speak with the same clarity as it has over the last 27 years.

Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories

Review by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

2nd Edition edited by Lisa C. Moore
RedBone Press, 2009

The True Self Discovered and The World Confronted

In 1996 Lisa C. Moore, the founder of Red Bone Press, published a collection of stories called Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories. The stories that were told on those pages were remarkable not only for what was said, but because they gave shape and form to what many in the African-American community knew, however, wanted to keep hidden. No one wanted to admit to outsiders that black families were just as likely to produce gay children as white families.

As America expanded her awareness and acceptance of homosexuality it seemed that the African-American community grew more perplexed, more jaded. The years of denial had left many blacks with much more to learn about gay people than their white counterparts. Many African-American women didn’t know it was possible to be married to a man who was gay. Most thought that if a man was married, had children, and a successful career there was no possibility of him being homosexual. The same logic gave rise to the idea that a mother could not also be a lesbian. Therefore, Moore’s anthology was an important move forward for all people of African-American or black descent.

Unfortunately, thirteen years after the original publication of Does Your Mama Know? there are still young people, especially women, emerging from African-American homes without a sense of what it means to be a lesbian. As Moore points out in her introduction to the 2nd edition, “Black women have a rich oral history of lesbianism: Everybody knows of the bulldagger of the block that their mamas used to talk about.” However, most of these stories are intended to shame the lesbians rather than to empower them or the younger women of the community. The stories, poems and interviews that comprise Moore’s collection not only offer insight into the mindset of the African-American community, they make the issues faced by Lesbians of color feel much more personal than is possible in the rumors and folklore found on the streets.

For example, without going too far into the book we encounter perhaps the most important and primary source of rejection that black lesbians endure, the church. Regardless of ethnic background, most readers know enough about the Christian church to know that until very recently, homosexuality was counted amongst the greatest of sins. In many cases those who were thought or proven to be gay were forbidden from talking part, fully, in the life of the church, if not driven out of the church family completely. For many blacks this isolation means that there is little socially or spiritually that can be undertaken, because the church is so well integrated into the community. As Hope Massiah says in her story, “1985: Memories of My Coming Out Year”: “When I left the Church, I left my community behind me”. Thus Massiah, like the other woman represented in this collection, tells a story of falling in love, a story of seeking a new sense of community through attending women’s retreats, and becoming involved with the women’s movement.

This loss of community often means a strained or broken relationship with one’s mother. Terri Jewell’s mother says,

“As if wearing those thick glasses and cutting your hair down to the nub isn’t asking for

Tribulation, girl. Now you’re getting fatter and fatter. Don’t you care about how you

look? Don’t you have any pride in yourself?

Later she says to Terry, “I am so ashamed of you, I can’t mention your name to the women at work who are always talking about their daughters.”

Some gay women are raised by supportive families such as “Miss Ruth” who is ninety plus years old when she is interviewed by Terri Jewell. “Miss Ruth” was able to work, overcame racism and found enough freedom in Detroit to live openly with a woman she calls “Babe”. However, for most there are issues that seem almost insurmountable.

The stories in Does Your Mama Know? : An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories, are so well written that when we walk away from them it is impossible not to understand how remarkable it is to be born black, female, and lesbian. For being born black is still to be born into a world that is not fully ready to accept your arrival, and to arrive also being gay means you are truly an alien in your own land. This collection of coming out stories is important not only because it draws attention to the issues faced by lesbians of color, but because it highlights their struggle to be accepted as fully embodied human begins.

Breaking Out of Bedlam by Leslie Larson

Crown/Shaye Areheart Books, 2010
Review by Hannah Eason

Cora Sledge, the more-than-unlikely heroine of Leslie Larson’s Breaking Out of Bedlam, is overweight, decommissioned by a wide variety of pills she really shouldn’t have in the first place, and disoriented. This is the condition her grown children discover her in right before deciding to move her out of her home and into an assisted living facility, “The Palisades.”

Among Cora’s primary objections to the place: she is not allowed to smoke at will and her access to pills is now restricted. She has plenty of other complaints about being ousted from her own home and into this strange land of disease and incontinence. Despite herself, she begins writing in the journal her granddaughter, Emma, has given her, recording her frustrations with both her present and her past. She also records her unexpected liaisons – the gossipy women with whom she feels at odds from day one; the male attendee who helps with her breathing treatments (and smuggles in cigarettes for her) who is, appearance to the contrary, “that way”; and Vitus, the mysterious, well-mannered man she finds herself attracted to.

These entanglements, which Cora never anticipated making, inspire some of her forays into the past. She begins tilling down to the heart of her own story, recording things she hasn’t been able to say, hasn’t been able to face before.

As we learn of Cora’s past, we plainly see the dynamics which have contributed to her rather abrasive personality. By the same token, her story reveals the progression of a woman who was determined to never give in despite the pressure, at times overwhelming, which seemed to call for her resignation. We see a woman who faced what so many women silently did growing up when she did: a sense of being cut off from her own personal power, needing to rely on her connections with the men in her life to ensure a positive outcome for herself. She takes measures she isn’t proud of, she commits to a relationship which does not excite her (which makes her feel panicked, even, as she considers how it will determine the whole spread of her life to come), she silences the dreams she’s carried as a girl in the name of ascertaining a future for her children and herself.

The real story of Breaking Out of Bedlam is Cora’s bravery in facing and forgiving herself. She brings a spunky, irreverent spirit to the theme of late-in-life reflection on the past. To me, her voice seemed to make a journey as Cora herself did – in the beginning of this novel, I disliked her voice, finding it aggressive to the point of crude and lacking in warmth. As Cora journals, making the confessions she feels necessary to herself, those aggressive, crude qualities, while not vanishing, become endearing.

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