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.

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.

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.

The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh

Shaye Areheart Books, 2009
Review by Mayra David

This is a story that spans time, cultures, continents, even worlds. But for all that, its essence lies in the story of the Leahy family tragedy: Meave Leahy has lost her twin. It’s this tragedy that has since simultaneously driven and held her back in all aspects of her small life in Betheny, New York.

It’s been many years since Meave Leahy has been to visit her parents’ home in Castine, Maine. In fact she hasn’t been back since escaping to college, soon after losing her sister. Though we get everything from Meave’s perspective, she offers no clues to what happened to her twin nine years ago. It’s as if she doesn’t even allow herself the merest complete thought on the topic of Moira. Here, Therese Walsh creates true tension in the reader. There’s a sense, in the beginning, that the story might be beyond the details of the loss of Moira, that this may be a story about how the twin who was left behind finds a way to move on. But then slowly, and clearly against the will of Meave herself, we realize that this story is about taking a long, painful look backwards.

In fact, it’s not just about looking backwards, but almost physically reliving the past. The book’s premise is based in part on the possibility of a magical antique keris (javanese dagger) acting as a bridge not only into the depths of Meave’s repressed memories, but into the spirit world. This sudden turn in the story is softened by the introduction of the Leahy twins as already having an almost magical connection with each other. It’s a common notion that twins share intense bonds, but here it is shown as a concrete skill the sisters have developed; sensing physical and emotional pain, “seeing” each other from afar, and when necessary, “blocking” their minds from each other to gain privacy.

Still, this is where it gets a little dicey for the book. After ensconcing the reader in one genre (family drama), the story takes a turn into legends about ancient javanese weapon-making. Of course this requires that the fantastical plot bend be backed up by both historic facts and javanese legends involving dream worlds, spiritual energy, and superstition. The kind of stuff fantasy films a la Tomb Raider are made of.

Thankfully, Walsh keeps the story from becoming tacky by keeping the heart of the story where it belongs: between Meave and Moira Leahy. Their relationship is honest, touching, and painful. In short: real. In fact their complex story is so compelling, one must often fight the urge to simply read the chapters where Walsh moves the story back in time, when the girls were still together. Fantasy, mystery, historic fiction, family drama, romance. If anything, there is almost too much story here. But the book is well written, fast paced, and has enough depth to carry it all.

Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard

The Permanent Press, July 2010
Review by Rhianon E. Huot

When I received Georgeann Packard’s “Fall Asleep Forgetting” in all it’s tree green colored gloriousness and noted on the inside jacket that not only does Packard write, but she’s a photographer and a graphic designer as well, I looked forward to the read. I should have remembered what mothers everywhere tote as sage advice, “Never judge a book by it’s cover.”

Never have I appreciated Hemingway’s thorough character portrayals as much as when I read this book. Like them or hate them, his characters give us a clear depiction of what life is like for a woman, a hero, an anti-hero, a misogynist or a broken down war veteran within the context of his written scene. Packard’s characters are card board cutouts of her thoughts, two dimensional and reeking with her own opinions. She might as well be whispering a subliminal message to us while we read: “This is how you’re supposed to feel. This is what you’re supposed to think.”

Just when I thought there was some deeper rhyme or reason to this book, Packard would pull the rug out from under me by evoking every obnoxious cliché you can think of. She uses blue to represent sadness, despondency. She gives us a transvestite named “Cherry,” who brushes off other’s maltreatment by realizing that some people are just “simple.” Even a wild-child who detests wearing shirts or shoes walks across the overly predictable pages.

There is no discernable reasoning to the layout of “Fall Asleep Forgetting.” The book is divided into sections marked by black and white photographs that lack enough contrast to discern up from down. Under the photographs Packard has phrases. These phrases are just as random as the division, some are from the bible, others appear to have come from nowhere at all and say things like, “I am alone only to the degree that I separate myself from the natural world.” Surely I’m just not getting it, I initially told myself. Are these abrupt endings and starts a way to mark the passing of time, a way to delineate characters stories and interactions from each other? Perhaps they are separated based on the bits of one characters journal, which is sprinkled throughout the book. Surely these phrases all add up to something that has an overall motif, a meaning. No, none of this logic seems to rule the book.

Increasingly as the work progresses, it turns into erotica, thinly veiled as something deeper. Packard finds a way to mention the breasts of each female character, as often as possible, in nearly every scene. Marked with cliché adjectives like “plush,” “soft,” and “warm,” Packard distracts from any real story telling with terribly unbelievable sex scenes between a married couple and another young woman. As you navigate the book, it becomes hard to help but wondering if her female characters don’t represent some form of wish fulfillment on her part.

Just when you think things can’t get any worse Packard has a character pass gas at a restaurant and then proclaim to the proprietor, “And that, dear Rose, is the best thing on your menu.” Later, during a scene with a married couple, a woman whispers into her husband’s ear, “You cook like you make love, my sweet, with a charming disrespect for recipe.” Really, this is too much. Let me save you the trouble of ever having to put this book down in annoyance. You will never have to put it down, if you don’t first, pick it up.

Spanking New by Clifford Henderson

Bold Strokes Books, 2009

Review by Mayra David

A warning: the cover of the book posits: “Imagine if you could choose your parents…and your sex!” In fact, the author did not imagine any such thing. The narrator, Spanky, is a Floating Soul that has been “dripped” out of The Known into the Land of Forgetting in order to find parents and be born. Only, instead of choosing, Spanky is fated to particular parents, whom he finds easily enough because he has been dripped in their immediate vicinity. Then, at some point or other, he realizes he’s a boy.

Still, I was happy to suspend my disbelief and dive into a story about a boy soul that finds he will be born a girl. Truthfully, I was expecting something to unfold that ultimately did not. A look at the inner struggles of transgendered persons perhaps. Or an imagining of what brings about our sexual orientations. Instead, Henderson goes down a more familiar route: an after-school-special type story about unplanned pregnancy for Spanky’s parents, Rick and Nina.

It is with the unplanned preganancy that the story really starts, as it begs the question: Can we do this alone? Suddenly, this young couple finds itself in need of support, and where support is lacking among blood relations, Henderson does a good job of showing how human nature will then reach out to find it, even from an unlikely source. Slowly, we see Rick’s reserve toward Nina’s gay friends melt. He accepts their help and friendship, and returns it, for his own sake instead of Nina’s.

One big weakness of the book is the narrating voice. Not satisfied with either conventional first-person or omniscient narrators, Henderson tries, unsuccessfully, to merge the two – a first person narrative with an omniscient point of view. Though he is not omnipresent, he is conveniently omniscient anyway. “Whoa Doggies! What did I miss? I scan back in time. …”? And he provides no wisdom from The Known – unless “I need an XX and an XY to get the job done” counts as insight. Less Floating Soul, more Alien Kid among earthlings.

The issue of two XX’s or two XY’s being together is touched upon briefly, when Spanky tries to understand homosexuality and theorizes:

“The Land of Forgetting is about reproduction and getting born. I wonder if it’s possible for a soul to get the wrong body. [...] The Known can’t make mistakes. Can it?”

This should have been the crux of the whole book, but after seamlessly introducing it into the story, Henderson steers clear of it, opting for a conventional narrative about young people who find each other through their struggles. In doing that, she deflects from the philosophical reflection her own characters seems to demand.

These characters seem boringly familiar: The musician son at odds with his insurance salesman father. The daughter who is her father’s ‘pumpkin’ no-matter-what. But then again, there are lessons Henderson wishes to impart here – lessons best received from familiar people. Their thoughts and circumstances are all relatable. Except in one instance: Before Spanky’s parents meet, his mother, the 21 year old actress, is in love with the gay costume designer named Pablo, and refuses to realize he is gay even after he has her dress as a boy and takes her with him to a club called ‘Chaps’. Really, I can only suspend my disbelief so much.

Next Page »