Some August Fiction Staff Reviews
Looking for a Labor Day weekend read? We have some suggestions
Several times a month, The Ribbon will run a collection of recent Literati bookseller reviews of recent titles. As this is our first installment, please enjoy the following reviews of August fiction releases — hardcover and paperback.
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything as beautiful as the melody of Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn. As I walked along the streets of a Brooklyn suffocating in racial tension and poverty with a beautiful, lost, black girl named August growing up without her mother, I was halted, over and over again, by the beauty of Woodson’s prose. This book is filled with words that spread over me like a clear summer’s day. In dealing with race and memory, paired with that quiet, rolling ache we call girlhood, Another Brooklyn manifests the strongest truths: that life powers forward with or without the people we hold dearest; that the present never really exists; and that maybe where we come from has everything to do with where we’re going.
— Claire
The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee
The Bones of Paradise is a sweeping historical novel set in the raw Nebraska ranch lands during the decade following the massacre at Wounded Knee. Life for ranchers and surviving indians was riddled with chaos,deceit and violence. In this setting the author serves up a compelling tale of power struggles within the multigenerational Bennett family. While they fight with each other they also struggle to solve a murder and battle outsiders who want to gain oil and mineral rights to their land. Moving back and forth in time and between characters the story pulls you in as pieces of the mysteries fall into place. Much of the strength of the novel comes from vivid descriptions of the surroundings as well the perfectly tuned internal dialogue of the characters.I thoroughly enjoyed being captivated by the Bennett family saga and the engrossing spell of this masterful blend of history and mystery.
— Sharon
When Watched by Leopoldine Core
The stories in Leopoldine Core’s collection When Watched often contain human pairings: post-coital partners of attraction or transaction or the grayness between; married couples; strangers; sisters; a mother and a daughter; someone trying to figure out who they miss, even if it is “no single person”; a person and that person’s fantasy of someone else; friends who asymmetrically wish to be lovers; one couple facing and not facing their significant age gap, willing and not willing to be defined by gross societal convention or biology, maybe just hoping to transcend all that in a small moment with their new dog, outside of a highway exit taco joint, suddenly “the keepers of something beautiful”; binary couplings doomed sometimes by immediate circumstance, sometimes by the equalizing prospects of time and death.
In a trivial way, we’re watching them. In a nontrivial way, they are watching each other. Is it perhaps in the hopes that this watching, this witnessing, might be a path to human understanding — because why wouldn’t it be and why, so often, is it not that at all? Sometimes fate calls out to these pairs in the form of, say, Gram Parsons on the car stereo when he sings that “we’ll pay for the love that we stole.” Sometimes these pairs are not and will not be called out out to, symbolically or otherwise. For them, the rest will just be the white space on the page after the last, sudden paragraph. These stories are brilliant flashes of life like the teeth of someone suddenly smiling at you. “Smiling is powerful,” one character thinks to herself, simply and utterly capturing the adjective’s precarious polysemy. Fragments of dialogue in these stories will stick in our heads for days, or read like something we’ve always thought, or like people we knew. In those moments, it will be as though these stories were watching us.
— John
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko by Scott Stambach
The 1986 Chernobyl disaster has been in the news again since Svetlana Alexievich, author of Voices from Chernobyl, won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. What we forget is that although Chernobyl was in Ukraine, much of the nuclear fallout also affected the neighboring state of Belarus. The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaneko is first time novelist Scott Stambach’s unforgettable imagining of the mostly interior life of one horribly deformed adolescent inmate at a Belarus children’s hospital for abandoned babies and “Gravely Ill” children. Graphically told, unshirkingly honest, Ivan’s grim days are enlightened by 3 great loves: literature, the maternal love of the kind nurse who sneaks him books and treats, and a recently orphaned girl with leukemia. It reminded me of The Tin Drum — stick with it a couple chapters, and I dare you to put it down.
— Carla
