In this moving and magical literary journey, a heroine grapples with a terrifying power.
A young girl gains the ability to see the death of anyone she touches in this debut “modern(ish)” fairy tale.
Waking on her 13th birthday, Lily kisses her father good morning and is struck by a vision of how he will drown that very day. Frightened by this new talent, which seems to have come to her just as her body is beginning to change into that of a woman, Lily feels as if there is an “other girl” inside her, one whom Lily is determined to keep locked away. When Lily’s father does indeed drown, her mother—an outsider who has never liked their strange little fishing village—whisks the girl away across the wooden footbridge that is the village’s only connection to the outside world, a bridge whose other end is always shrouded in fog. Thus begins a rare caliber of story that should transport and submerge readers in a fantastic and fantastical adventure. Will Lily survive in the world beyond her village? Will she be able to rid herself of this new and terrible power to foresee death? Will she contain the “other girl” developing inside of her? Once started, Lily’s mystical and often macabre journey is nearly impossible to stop reading, as she seeks answers and finds herself in surprising company, such as that of the Rev. Silas Everyman, “a miracle worker,” and his traveling evangelical circus. Despite some seemingly familiar fairy-tale tropes—a witch named Baba Yaga lives in the woods and eats children, for example—little is as it first appears. Like many of the characters, Baba Yaga is more complex than she seems; is she hunting Lily or helping her? Not even Baba Yaga knows for sure. As Andersen has done for the book’s beautifully bizarre yet detailed illustrations, Ford has filled his novel with customs and side stories—some no more than a sentence or two—that make the world feel real, wonderful, and horrifying simultaneously. And though in many ways it seems nothing like one, this novel is at heart a fairy tale in the grand, dark tradition of the best of such stories; the book speaks to the reader’s deepest fears and highest hopes, told through the odyssey of a girl who is scared by what is happening around her and within her.
In this moving and magical literary journey, a heroine grapples with a terrifying power.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59021-268-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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