GRIEF EATER, female rage, childhood betrayal, homophobic idiocy revenged upon

GRIEF EATER
EMMA OSBORNE
Interstellar Flight Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Visceral, gritty, and unforgiving, GRIEF EATER is a zombie story like you’ve never read before.

When Kristina rises from her violent death, she’s not the same fragile woman her family once abandoned. She’s rageful, powerful, and hungry—for the blood of the ones who were supposed to love her. With a newfound craving to see vengeance and grief served, she launches into a once-in-an-undead-lifetime journey across blood-slicked highways to the scorched Australian bush and her hometown. As her body fails and her mind fractures, she’s left with one final question: Is she here to forgive, or to feed?

A transgressive, gory examination of queer identity and found family, GRIEF EATER sinks its teeth into trauma and what it means to be devoured by grief.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't read many zombie stories, so I can't say "this is really different from all the others in the genre" with any confidence or authority. I can say I don't think anyone I've run across discusses the way the zombies are resonating with their readers on the level of emotional impact, of exploring how grief is a deadly contagion.

Katrina is one of the interesting-to-me abuse archetypes: someone who was offhandedly neglected, occasionally brutalized by unkindness from, it seems, earliest life; someone who is benumbed by her absence of caring for her as a person as well as damaged by the indifference to her actual fleshly person's caretaking. It is not uncommon for queer, odd, Othered kids to suffer this fate.

Ask me how I know. (Not a serious invitation...don't, please.)

So Kristina's brutalization by those with a duty of care towards her is resonant with me, and with many millions of us around the world. I don't...can't bear to...say "billions" though I suspect it's the literal truth. Katrina awakens to her afterlife as a zombie because her life as a human ended gorily and as a result of abandonment. It's weirdly liberating, this alteration. It's permission to drop her human life's expectations for the raw, vicious reality of revenge...of bringing into meatspace the consuming hatred of those who ignored and dismissed Katrina when she most needed their care: "I know now why we look so mindless, so insatiable to the living. There is beauty in letting your body glut itself with rich fat and small bones."

As a novella, this horror story is finely judged to the point where it felt to me, as I came to its end, there was not lingering sense that this or that was in need of more room to develop. The SFnal background was deftly handled in that it is left as a background. It isn't the point of the storytelling, so let it be the story's matrix. I often wish horror/near-future SF would choose this deliberate backgrounding in place of half-hearted worldbuilding that is more or less an infodump. Better in my mind, for my reading taste, to offer fewer details but place them with care and forethought in place of a wodge of stodge that's plopped before you and assumed to be part of your mental furniture henceforth. My example of this technique at its most irritating is how Asimov treated us in Foundation. My example of how my preferred method of establish and reinforce lightly but effectively is Orwell's clock striking thirteen in the very first line of 1984.

It's a rare feat to tell me a story about a subject I'm not interested in...zombies in this case...and come away with my admiring compliment: this is a close-to-perfect example of its format and its subject matter.

THE CUT LINE, survival...contingent contentment...solitude

THE CUT LINE
CAROLINA PIHELGAS (tr. Darcy Hurford)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship.

She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. A lot of physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish.

Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence.

Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine—always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing—undergoes profound transformations, too. The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Reckoning with the toxicity of Love is the most difficult emotional task I know of; it is the central concern of this story. In Liine's life there is no softness in the emotional gifts anyone around her grudgingly and contingently grants to her. She finally accepts her partner will never be a validating, accepting, kind force supporting her own betterment. Running away at last, she lands at a family property far from the city, where there is nothing much in the way of modern conveniences. She's also hounded...well...tracked down anyway by her family who think she should accept that her violent, withholding ex is as good as she'll ever get for a man to be with.

Been there, Liine.

Her stubborn resistance to submit to family or ex is rooted in her desire to survive, maybe begin to thrive. But there's a catch (of course there is): her rural haven is under severe stress from climate change; and it's very close to a NATO base provocatively situated close to Estonia's border with Russia, their former colonial power. Liine might have leapt out of the frying pan but it looks like the fire is fast approaching.

Her willingness to work hard is barely keeping her even with the environmental changes; her emotional healing work is under siege from the perfidious ex's smear campaign in their friend circle (after a breakup, Liine, walk away and let those who care follow you; those who don't are not your friends), and her family's pressure to go back; the NATO base is constantly "testing" ie exploding weapons in a cacophonous assault on nature. An environment that does not support her much-needed self-repair work. So what else is new.

It sounds very challenging, right? It really is; it really demands we invest in Liine to overcome her manifold obstacles to becoming herself, for herself, not answering to anyone else. If she can stay the course...if she can pull the heroic feat of self-reinvention off....

In under 150pp, you're not getting a full redemption arc. It's more a book about vibes, about being in the moment with the character. I was rooting for her to live each day, since she tells us directly that "at night I die several times" to make sure we get how intense the labor she does really is.

It comes from deep within, an anger I've never dared to feel before. It's a wild feeling of injustice that I've been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn't deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won't fight back. Why didn't I fight back? Why did I put up with it all? I'm mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment. That's another thing that's been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn't you leave sooner? Stop.

That's a distillation of the work of recovery from abuse that can't be bettered.

What you're getting in this plunge-pool of a story is the dive not the swim. The ending isn't A Resolution; it's Liine committing herself to resolving the problems she came to sort out, to coping with the problems she has limited control over (nature, NATO), and being her own, real, honest self.

It is a gratifying story to read to me in this moment I'm making changes in my own life. It is not all tied up with a bow. That won't be to everyone's taste, some facets (eg going to her sister for...what? nothing happens) were not to mine. No perfect score from me; but a deep, enfolding read about a tough woman finding the strong core she needs to stand on while facing down the world.

And she does it for herself.

ONE TRUE WORD, exhortation, plea, demand, or...?

ONE TRUE WORD
SNÆBJORN ARNGRÍMSSON (tr. Larissa Kyzer)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A #1 bestselling hypnotic psychological thriller from Iceland, in which a woman abandons her husband on an uninhabited island.

“So gripping I simply couldn't put it down. . . Atmospheric and original with an ending I did not see coming” — Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, author of The Creak on the Stairs

Why did she do it?

After a day of simmering tension on a trip to an uninhabited island, Júlia finally reaches breaking point. In a fit of fury she makes a reckless decision—leaving her husband Gíó marooned in the middle of a freezing fjord in the depths of the Icelandic winter. As the cold dark of night swiftly approaches, she leaves without looking back.

When she regrets her decision and returns, he is nowhere to be found. There is no trace of him, and no sign of where he may have gone. The police launch a manhunt, but soon their suspicion falls on his wife. In an attempt to shield herself from their speculation, Júlia weaves an elaborate net of lies, trying to convince the police—and herself—of her innocence. But as her story starts to crumble, dark secrets start coming to light.

As time runs out, Júlia races to discover what really happened. But is Gíó alive or dead? In hiding or hunting her down? And can Júlia get to the truth before it destroys her?

One True Word is a #1 bestseller in Iceland that has been acclaimed by authors such as Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the former Icelandic Prime Minister.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Júlía has a psychotic break and abandons her justifiably irritable "husband" on a little rocky islet in the North Atlantic Ocean. At night. In winter.

Despite the psychotic break, and the probable underlying paranoid personality disorder, she regrets her action and returns...the next day, after realizing she can't explain his disappearance away well enough to avoid legal problems, and fearing manslaughter charges...but he is not there.

This is bad. Epically bad. Contacting the police and spinning them a fantastical pack of lies, as she has done to evade blame her whole life (we meet the sister who hates her guts, and rightly so) she lives in fear that 1) the police will find his body, and b) he's alive and out there waiting to get revenge for what she did to him. And no blame on him if he is.

Her lies are ever more baroque and untenable. The legal system does what it is set up to do, poke into every corner and demand all the information, all the data, all the facts...but would Júlía even know a fact? Is there some...reason...for this psychotic break that she just can not face? Is she retrofitting details suggested, innocently enough, by the questions she has to answer?

In extremely short chapters and unadorned prose, this Icelandic thriller unwinds the worst moment of a wounded soul's life. It's tightly focused on Júlía, we never hear anyone else's thoughts or feelings except as they're expressed to, recalled by, her. It's not a nice place to be, Júlía's head...her perceptions are disturbingly off-kilter from the things she's reporting that she heard. Paranoid personality disorder? Abuse survivor? Both?

It's a book of questions, ambiguities, uncertain footings. If that and a very disjointed flow of story are not enjoyable to you, this ain't your read. I was drawn in by the sheer brio of a writer who focuses a noir thriller in the tightest focus on a woman who's undergoing a breakdown around her "husband"'s possible death, positive disappearance, at her own hands...unless she's dissociating, dissembling, desperately gnawing off her metaphorical arm to escape...what?

I detested Júlía, and thought her life was enough of a fantasyland that I was never fully sure Gíó, the vanished man she's not legally married to, was real. Could I even trust her to tell me the truth about that? Is it a lie or is her paranoia destabilizing my readerly radar that much?

I can't give five stars to the read despite the engagement and investment it elicited from me. Its ending was not on the same level of inventiveness as the rest of the story. It felt to me as though I was being dumped the minute after having brain-melting sex. Reality does this to me all the time; fiction should not!

I've also shaved off the partial stars because the short, choppy chapters that (I think) are intended to be in the places Júlía experiences breaks in her reality feel distancing, are in fact impediments to my connection to an already unlikable narrator. So I land on four of five stars but with the caveat that it's a better story, if not read, than this rating suggests.

WHAT HUNGER, weirdly satisfying and thoroughly revolting at the same time

WHAT HUNGER
CATHERINE DANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting coming-of-age tale following the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Ronny Nyugen, as she grapples with the weight of generational trauma while navigating the violent power of teenage girlhood, for fans of Jennifer’s Body and Little Fires Everywhere.

It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.

Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family's meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem chua, and steaming bowls of pho tái with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.

But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.

What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny’s Vietnamese lineage and her mother’s emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Adolescence is a time of Certainty covering terrified confusion, Outrage covering terrified hurt. The cultural Western headiness of slobbering pandering laser-focused attention on the adolescent, a malleable consumer/believer in the making, from all sides ignites the fuel into a solar-intensity conflagration of perspectiveless conviction that, unless *I* like/love/want it, it's a Plot to Ruin My Life.

I get lots of criticism for using Capital Letters in my writing. Here it's done, as it most often is, to highlight an emotional not a rational response evoked or intended by the author (me or other) to be evoked. Perspective needs to be earned and learned the hard way, so this is all perfectly understandable. It's also why so many of us can not stand coming-of-age stories, to the point where I recommend them to those most intensely averse to them in order to watch their manners pumps explode with the effort to say no without screaming at me. (Hiya Kath!)

In this story Ronny's ready-to-ignite rage goes critical in several incidents. The response to that criticality is, in keeping with the title, related to food choices...not unusual for adolescent females, but decidedly NOT the usual eating-disorder narrative I'm heartily sick of reading. It is if anything an inverted use of eating disorders I'm accustomed to. I've known no anthropophagic beings. Plenty of bulimics and anorexics.

What Hunger is a hilariously apt, darkly funny title for a deeply, darkly, eucharistically furious story. It's metaphor gone clear, in scientological jargon, and exteriorized. (Y'all, stick to Wikipedia to look up scientology stuff. DO NOT USE CHAT OR GOOGLE. The consequences are dire.) I'm not always interested in body horror used to explain rage, but this story worked the alchemy I need to get invested in the action. It was indeed gross at times.

Balancing that, and creating what felt to me an exquisite tension, was Ronny's family history of expressing love through gorgeously evoked meals that I damn near passed out from drooling myself into dehydration while reading. What a food vocabulary Author Dang has! It's a pleasure to read someone's upsetting writing when it then soothes me with food.

I'm easy. You might not be.

The most notable dissatisfaction I have is the pacing of the story after Ronny's, um, conversion? discovery? whatever, big change. Action slows to allow for introspection for quite a stretch, and it did not get back to work soon enough for this reader. There are developments that, in their absence of a world-building framework, just sorta...happen...which very seldom works out best for the narrative cohesion or character development. I mean, "ewwwww" is okay if it effloresces out of some Lovecraftian something, not so much done here.

The complexity of the family's internal dynamics are the source of the extra half-star on the three and a half I was planning to award this very good but not outstanding tale. Ronny, like any adolescent, is still molding her responses around her family. She, like the most bearable adolescents I've ever known, is adaptable in her responses still, not hardening into adamant certainty. She has a very touching relationship with her mother and her auntie, both still morphing as she develops.

I don't know if everyone will enjoy the horror bits, or want to experience them getting the good relationship development, but if your stomach is strong this is a contender for your summer reading.

SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM, reckonings are brutal...on everyone involved & I FEAR MY PAIN INTERESTS YOU, young feminist's récit

SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM
LAURA WARRELL
Pantheon Books
Trade Paper $17.00, available now

LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus.

Delivering a lush orchestration of diverse female voices, Warrell spins a provocative, soulful, and gripping story of passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, and, finally, hope and reconciliation, in answer to the age-old question: how do we find belonging when love is unrequited?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It depresses me to say this, but this book was...despite truly, deeply impressive writing...

The girl may have been the end for him.

That the wind shifted and sent a chill across her freshly cleaned skin so that she sensed her own solitude in a way that no longer frightened her as she walked bare and unhindered toward what was new.

...lovely and fully sensory-universe-planted but, and this is the crux of the matter for me, it's about a man.

A group of women have different relationships with one man.

Ground-breaking stuff, no? Never read anything like it before! Except about half the Western canon. Women circle Circus, whose name suggested to me clownishness that I found ample evidence for. They *keep* circling Circus no matter what. And, folks, if there ever was a man whose actions and inactions invalidated his Manhood Card℠, it's Circus. He never met a responsibility he didn't shirk.

But his Art! is usually the rallying cry I hear. His art my lily-white one. He's a bog-standard self-absorbed arrested adolescent, probably a libertarian and a religious nut although those are my own interpolations, with a good line of patter and some skills in sexual gratification.

He is, bluntly, the kind of person I look down on and the kind of character I am deeply sickened to see recrudescing on best-of lists and getting all sorts of happy talk said about it. He's a serial cheater, an emotional abuser, and an unworthy object of our cultural attention because his brothers are teeming like maggots on a shit-pile, exuding their spurious shine that so many seem to see as attractive when it's actually the slime they secrete to slip out of any kind or sort of commitment that inconveniences, annoys, or bores them.

Yuck.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I FEAR MY PAIN INTERESTS YOU
STEPHANIE LaCAVA
Verso Fiction
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A punky, raw novel of millenial disaffection, trauma and 1960s cinema

Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to to the Pacific Northwest. She's seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man. But a chance encounter with a dubious doctor in a graveyard, and the discovery of a dozen old film reels, opens the door to a study of both the peculiarities of her body and the absurdities of her famous family.

A genre-bending, atmospheric and emotionally honest account of a young woman's investigation into her past and the complex reactions of her body.

At once an analysis of the abandoned 1968 Cannes Film Festival and a literary take on cinema du corp, Stephanie LaCava's new novel is an audaciously sexy and moving exploration of culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: ...and now for something marginally different...

Screwed-up child of famous parents is failing at Life because Trauma and she's got these awful habits that substitute for character and her whole head...this is a récit, not really a novel because the whole point is that we don't leave the lady's head and are reminded of it...is stuffed with shards of images and sounds and they all sort of coalesce into an image of...

...I have no way to finish that sentence. I didn't get an image from Margot's chaotic maunderings.

Yet again there are men at the center of her trauma. Men: Don't have relationships with women. It doesn't go anywhere good. You'll end up blamed for something and quite possibly sued.

That's my main take-away from this mishegas. There's no way for me to pluck a piece of the text out for your perusal because they all rely on each other, in a cumulative-effect way, for their power. I will say that, as little as I enjoyed the story I was quite interested in the way the author assembled the shards into an effective mosaic. Brightness, shadows, saturated colors; a vague grey smog of dissociation surrounding it, getting between the bright moments, eclipsing some of them. It's an interesting effect.

But the problem is it's telling me an oft-told tale of poor-little-rich-girl and I'm just not interested. Handed a life of family connections and a modicum of talent? Use 'em or reject 'em, but wallowing along in the gutter next to the highway and under the sidewalk is a choice for people like Margot. So I don't see the point of empathizing with her. "Make a different choice" is the callous, dismissive response Margot elicits from me.

Yet I read the whole book....

LIVID, think "12 Angry Men" but make it 1 ENRAGED woman

LIVID
CAI EMMONS
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman who is suffering from a tragic loss is placed on a jury with her estranged ex-husband.

Sybil White Brown returns from Boston to the small West Coast city where she once lived, hoping to heal after a terrible loss. Summoned to jury duty, she is dismayed to be assigned to the jury of a murder trial alongside her ex-husband with whom she had a rancorous divorce. As the trial progresses, she and her ex tiptoe around each other but eventually become disastrously entangled. Meanwhile, Sybil obsesses about the female defendant, whom she believes is innocent. The situation explodes during jury deliberations when Sybil comes face-to-face with her own unexpressed rage.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If anyone knows the deep contours of female rage, it's Author Cai Emmons...she's received the death sentence that we all dread. Her life will end, and not at some distant and amorphously unknowable date, but quite soon.

The question looms large: How does one assert oneself as a person, a woman, without a speaking voice, without sound waves commandeering attention?

Losing her voice to ALS has not silenced her, she says in LitHub. I'm glad it hasn't...I'm sad it won't get better...I'm deeply empathetic with her character's outrage!

As it happens, Author Emmons reached the end of her journey on the second of January. She was ten days short of her seventy-second birthday. I believe in some kind of afterlife, not one of personal survival or linked to An Eternal Reward or suchlike...but authors, for sure, experience an afterlife as long as their words, ideas, stories are read and thought about by we the living. I myownself will never forget Author Emmons for describing me, through the lens of someone else:

She wasn't old. Indeterminate thirties—everyone seems younger than I am these days—but her skin had been worked over, thickened and textured as if it was used to sealing things out, a skill I recognize.

It is the gift of an observant person to see past surfaces. It is the skill of an author to turn surfaces into substance, to make a whole of a glance and a brushed-past contact into a deep, layered bounce.

When I read in the Acknowledgments that Author Emmons was fired up to write Livid by watching the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, I was so deeply outraged and infuriated that I put off reading the book. I knew, deep inside the withered and wizened recesses of my whatever-replaced-a-soul, that I would screech in outrage at anything inspired by the travesty of justice and comedy of errors that put the United States of America's Supreme Court in the hands of the scum presently on it. A bit much for me at the time. I put the book aside.

Reading that Author Emmons had died on the second, I felt gripped with the need to learn what she wanted us to know when she chose this inspiration to follow as she herownself began to let go of her grasp on the world. I know there are more books by her coming out this year. I can't say it strongly enough: I think her work is important in subject, appealing in style, and worthy in its spiritual aims. I hope you'll buy them all.

In this story, from its inspiration we can be sure there will be no shortage of enraging subject matter. It's still startling to me that there's a man left alive who has managed to willfully un-know that their condescension and contempt for Womanhood (as opposed to for an individual woman, a different kettle of fish) is a source of volcanic rage and what I'd call a "fond return of contempt." I'd run over the plot for you, but you can read, it's right up there. What I want you to know is how deeply and genuinely Author Emmons explores that fondness I called out.

Sybil, our narrator, seeing Drew, her ex-husband, for the first time since a genuine and deeply painful tragedy ended their marriage, is assailed by the deep and fundamental existence of her anger.

The past will not die. It festers in the body's cells, inflames the tissues, refuses to relinquish its grip. In the face of such intransigence, what can you do but flee?

It is, as Sybil realizes, not possible to extricate her anger from her very being. That realization is central to everything that occurs in this short novel. Drew can't comprehend that Sybil is not going to "move on" or "forgive and forget," both of which nostrums are idiotic and unhelpful as concepts and impossible as goals in my own experience and in Sybil's. What she has done in her lifetime away from Drew and their shared hometown is...heal, scab over the wounds, to give herself a chance at making it through the nights and existing fully in the days of a different life than the one she left behind.

The jury that forms the book's internal audience for Sybil and Drew as the process the real reasons for the end of their relationship is largely faceless and affectless. The two people who count are Sybil and Sybil. Oh, and also Sybil. She is telling the story. She is setting the terms of our relationship with her. She is Responsible. And one gets the distinct impression that this is a unique experience in Sybil's life...think of Marguerite Duras' statement, "I believe there is a miracle in Wanda. Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated", quoted about the actress Barbara Loden's one and only directorial outing. In Sybil, Cai Emmons does much the same thing: She utterly erases the barriers between the reader and the character. Not solely by having Sybil narrate the story. The story that Sybil narrates mutates, alters, grows as she tells us more and more of it. By the time the ending comes, heralded by a startling act of redemption, Sybil has finally filled all of her personal space. Sybil has, unlike generations of women, fully and completely claimed all of the mass, all of the depth, all of the breadth of her body, her mind, her heart.

She is, for the first time, her own and her full, self. I was left in complete awe of this feat. Sybil did not, as she began speaking to me, seem as though she would be the kind of character who could, who would dare, to answer this call and stretch her self into the last corners of the mold we call "selfhood." Yet by the end of this compact book, I was standing in Sybil's sole, shining presence. Her rage was too huge to be contained another moment. Her actions, at long last, balanced the delicate and fragile state of inaction and indifference to her self that Sybil was required, as a woman, to assume.

It was deeply and pleasantly surprising as well as subtly and satisfyingly performed in this closely built, quietly molded work of art. I hope you will honor the memory of Cai Emmons in your own way and starting by reading one of her last works strikes me as fitting.