Reviews in Short
Consent by Vanessa Springora (Natasha Lehrer, Translator)
Recently released in paperback, this is a memoir of Vanessa Springora’s experience being taken advantage of by the once-celebrated French author Gabriel Matzneff beginning at age 14; he, at the time, was 49 years old. The account of their relationship, while disturbing in itself, is not more unsettling than how many at the time praised and even rewarded Matzneff—with comped hotel stays, cheap rent, fan letters, and the like—for his sexual proclivities towards children, both male and female. Springora’s recollections show a young woman manipulated into believing that she knew enough of the world, and herself, to choose romance with a man more than thrice her age, and the aftermath of her reality finally coming into focus. -Gianni Washington, Associate Fiction Editor
Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder
An inventive, surprising, and playful book, Nightbitch never quite allows the reader to grow comfortable or divine what might come next. Yoder’s language and narrative voice propel both plot and protagonist book through its bizarre, unsettling, and utterly compelling transformation that underlies the storyline, while her structure and pacing maintain an effective balance. The headlines are naturally focused on our heroine’s metamorphosis — physical, metaphysical, metafictional — but the slicing commentary on society, motherhood, gender expectations, and the oppressive respectability of daily life are not to be overlooked. Like all the best novels, Nightbitch has something important to say about the world in which it finds itself, and its opinions are just as fearlessly given as its title would suggest. -D.W. White, Fiction Editor
A Body Across Two Hemispheres by Victoria Buitron
Winner of the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize, Victoria Buitron's debut memoir-in-essays A Body Across Two Hemispheres demands attention. More than a personal recollection of Buitron's migration to Ecuador, the country of her birth, at age fifteen, and her experiences when she returned to the United States, this book is an absorbing examination of culture, identity, language, and immigration. The collection shows Buitron's impressive range as a writer, using a variety of narrative techniques—including collage documentary, abecedarian, second person POV—and displays a confidence rarely seen in a debut. It is a book that one will both want to read quickly because it's so absorbing, yet also want to slow down and savor; in other words, a book to revisit and reread. Deeply affecting and beautifully written, it is an important meditation on loss, love, belonging, and migration and highlights the convergence of the political and personal. A Body Across Two Hemispheres will be published in March 2022 by Woodhall Press and is available for pre-order. -Rachel León, Reviews Editor
Goldenrod by Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith’s latest Goldenrod explores the deeply personal, the topical, and the seemingly ordinary, weaving them all together in an honest and heartfelt collection. Smith touches on motherhood, marriage, loss, politics, and nature, to name a few, in poems that manage to be both devastating and hopeful. Standouts include “Talisman,” “Poem Beginning with a Retweet,” “At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Trees,” “A Room Like This,” and the titular “Goldenrod,” in which Smith declares, “I’m no botanist. If you’re the color of sulfur / and growing at the roadside, you’re goldenrod.” -Paulina Freedman, Associate Poetry Editor
Mona at Sea by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
As the Great Recession moves solidly into history a decade-and-a-half on, the subject grows ripe for fiction. Alongside Lucy Corin’s strong The Swank Hotel comes a biting, luminous, and wickedly funny debut, Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ Mona At Sea.
Set in the heat and stagnation of Tucson, Mona At Sea is also a supremely comfortable addition to the recent rise of first person present tense fiction. James’ novel is a fast-paced and insightful one as it follows the story of a young woman attempting to find her way into adulthood during the 2008 financial crisis. Determined, idealistic, headstrong, and often times her own worst enemy, Mona is a smart, witty narrator well-suited to craft an emotionally resonant look at a society full of contradiction.
As we see her simultaneously reckon with the broken promises of twenty-first century America and the fractured marriage of her parents, Mona establishes herself as a memorable protagonist sure to inspire literary descendants. Mona At Sea is the prized debut that engenders immediate anticipation for the next book to come.
-D.W. White, Fiction Editor
Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi
Described as a “black spirit memoir,” Akwaeke Emezi’s book chronicles the emotional highs and lows of life as an ọgbanje—an Igbo (Nigerian) spirit who is fated to be born repeatedly to the same human mother, only to die repeatedly as well—which is how Emezi (author of the critically acclaimed novels Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji) identifies. Each chapter is written as a letter to someone important to Emezi’s life—friends, an ex-lover, their human mother, their fellow-god siblings—and shares, in visceral detail, the beauty and agony of life in a world that, in many ways, fights against Emezi’s very existence. Emezi documents their surgical transition into a physical form befitting their spiritual one, the stress and pain inherent in being a feminine-presenting creative of color, and the long process of making a home for themselves in a country where they had none. Emezi writes honestly about money, the lurking constancy of depression, the demands of fame, and their attempts at suicide. But perhaps the most impactful takeaway is the redemptive power of one's chosen community. Dear Senthuran wields the light of gratitude like a lantern to wash the specter of hopelessness away. -Gianni Washington, Associate Fiction Editor
Writing the Novella by Sharon Oard Warner
This book on the craft of writing a novella, which is sometimes called a short novel or a long story, could easily function as a text in a fiction course and succeeds in its task of teaching the reader what makes a novella work, from structure and plot to character to setting and pace and so on. Each of the fifteen chapters leads one through craft talks that are followed by exercises on journaling and planning, organizing, and writing within this form. Throughout the craft discussion, Warner compares the novella to short stories and novels, showing how many of the craft points overlap. She points out the uniqueness of the novella, describing it as “the intersection between a place and a person,” which is ultimately her focus. -Kelly Harrison, Associate Editor
The Inland Sea by Madeline Watts
Madeleine Watt’s The Inland Sea is an ambitious, hungry debut, one that declines to limit itself to one or two neat storylines, instead taking on, much like the sprawling Australian landscape that rests so palpably as its foundation, a litany of narrative threads for consumption. Following the life of our narrator as she struggles through the heat of a Sydney summer and the uncertainties of a restless youth, The Inland Sea is unafraid in its portrayal of our modern world. Beset by a beleaguered climate, navigating the hazy world of undefined relationships in bars and bedrooms, and exposed to the raw underbelly of human nature while working at an emergency call center, Watts’ protagonist is at once brutally honest and sharply eloquent. Seeped in Australian history, both literary and colonial, The Inland Sea offers a refreshing perspective, and is a book ready-made for the heat of summer in a world reckoning with new definitions of normalcy. -D.W. White, Fiction Editor
I Am the Rage by Dr. Martina McGowan
I am the Rage is a poetry collection by Dr. Martina McGowan written entirely in 2020 in response to the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and far too many others. The titular poem "I am the Rage" sets the tone for the raw, unapologetic emotion throughout the collection, ranging from sadness to anger to defiance to the occasional glimmer of hope. In "We Are Alike, You and I," McGowan declares, "We will come for you / Not with clubs / Or tear gas / Or firebombs / But with words." This book offers a window into the black experience in today's America that is absolutely essential and valuable for readers of all races. -Paulina Friedman, Associate Poetry Editor
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
The Life of The Mind, from the wonderfully skilled debut author Christine Smallwood, comes at the perfect moment, a precise fit to this tense, irregular time. The heroine is Dorothy, a young woman in her early thirties, who is a part-time English professor and a full-time inner monologist. A refreshingly modern portrait, Smallwood foregrounds not the external pressures and expectations placed upon Dorothy, but instead the desires and workings of her own mind, as amusing and even ordinary as they at times can be. It is a fearless, funny, and unflinching book that examines the life of its protagonist as she navigates the unspoken jealousies of academia, the banal challenges of relationships, and the bizarre society of modern day New York City. For all its dark humor and insightful witticisms, however, The Life of The Mind is also a poignant and opportune look at feminism and mental health, as Dorothy balances dueling therapists, stagnant career ambitions, and an unspoken miscarriage in an attempt to claim for herself a contemporary manifestation of the American dream. -D.W. White, Fiction Editor
©2022 West Trade Review
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