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PANTHERS AND THE MUSEUM OF FIRE

Name: PANTHERS AND THE MUSEUM OF FIRE
Author: Jen Craig
ISBN: 978-1557-1344-448-6

by Jen Craig ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 2020

A dense, sometimes claustrophobic novel that flirts with the boundary between memory and invention.

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When her childhood friend dies, leaving behind a manuscript she is both reluctant and compelled to read, Jen Craig experiences the literary breakthrough she has waited for her entire life.

The main character in this novella of interiors shares a name with the book’s author. She also shares a city—Sydney, Australia—and an impassioned compulsion to write. In these ways, this unusual book has a relationship with autofiction along the lines of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series or Teju Cole’s Open City, sharing a thematic focus on the sources of writerly inspiration, ultimately seeming to propose that all subjects are really reflections of our selves. Jenny, the character, lives in Glebe, a suburb of Sydney. One Monday morning, she leaves her apartment to walk to a cafe on Crown Street in Surry Hills, some two and a half miles away. The goal of this trip is to meet Pamela—the older sister of Jen’s recently deceased childhood friend, Sarah—in order to return Sarah’s unpublished manuscript, titled Panthers and The Museum of Fire, which Pamela gave to Jen at her sister’s wake and then requested back, unread. As Jen walks, she thinks. As she thinks, she carries the reader through the intervening years, from her childhood friendship with Sarah to Jen’s own anorexia to a religious conversion instigated by Pamela; from her “one real friendship” with her college friend Raf to her father’s consuming failure to write the “one great work that everyone continues to ridicule him about” while he slowly succumbs to cancer; from her own sense of her grandiosity and potential to a lingering dread that even the closest people in her life ridicule and shun her. The distinct scenes of this book—the “house party” at which Jen finds religion in her youth, a date with Raf some years earlier, Sarah’s wake two days prior, and a dinner with Raf only the night before—weave in and out of Jen’s progress across the meticulously rendered landscape of the city proper as her thoughts spiral, double-back, wallow, and soar. Sarah’s book, which is named for a road sign on the outskirts of Sydney, is simultaneously “nothing at all” and the instigating event for Jen’s own literary awakening—a book that gets to the “quick” of things and is, in fact, nothing but quick. It frees Jen from her own foundering attempts to write and shows her a new way forward. The result is the book the reader now holds in their hands four years after the day that Jen, the character, first set off on her book-length walk.

A dense, sometimes claustrophobic novel that flirts with the boundary between memory and invention.

Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020

ISBN: 978-1557-1344-448-6

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Zerogram Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CORRESPONDENT

by Virginia Evans ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2025

An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.

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A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.

Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.

An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.