A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
A review by Rebecca Donner
Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries -- relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert's remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause. Dorothy's method, starvation, is agonizingly slow, and we are introduced to its brutal consequences in the opening chapter, narrated by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn. "I was afraid I would break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word," she says, and likens her mother's emaciated body to "cracked sticks and hard as that." The quiet, detached tone of Evelyn's narration convincingly evokes her shock in confronting tragedy. Later, crossing the Atlantic on the SS Woodrow Wilson, the orphaned Evelyn dispassionately renounces any connection to her once-beloved mother: "I have sworn I'll start...
|
 |
Previously Reviewed by National Book Critics Circle
Sort: by date | by title | by author
Advanced Elvis Course by Caconrad
 It has been thirty-two years since Elvis Presley died at age 42, a bloated victim of prescription pills and Nutter Butters, and over fifty when a thinner Elvis burst onto the American scene, singing and twitching his way into the hearts of millions. Although it seemed he reigned as The King for as...
Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream by Leonard Zeskind
 This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true.
"Rightwing extremists," the report...
Confetti Girl by Diana Lopez
 Corpus Christi author Diana Lopez ventures successfully into young-adult literature with Confetti Girl (Little, Brown, $15.99 hardcover), the story of Lina Flores, a middle-school teenager who's finding out that despite all those fantasy representations of the heart, "real hearts are reddish purple ...
Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind
 The bigger the war, the greater the number of books about it. No matter how you define big -- lives lost, cost, population displacement, devastation to infrastructure -- World War II tops the list. Nonfiction tomes aside, over the last sixty years World War II has inspired a plenitude of fiction...
Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon
 Wartime Sarajevo, Bosnia, early 1990s, as reported by a character in Aleksandar Hemon's novel The Lazarus Project: The electricity, out for months at a stretch, would return intermittently, bringing the lights and radios and televisions that had been left on suddenly to life. But the power grid...
Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
 Since the days of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, American authors have had a penchant for sweeping allegory, for tales that examine universal human qualities through the presentation of stylized and generalized characters. This tradition is carried on today by authors such as Cormac McCarthy in his...
Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing by Rob (edt) Spillman
 Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, edited by Rob Spillman of Tin House, is a keenly collected and expertly packaged anthology of urgent and vital writing.
One would do well to read this book because: a) Africa is larger than the United States, Europe, and...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin
 "Everyone has three lives," Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told Gerald Martin. "A public life, a private life and a secret life." With little help from the novelist himself, who merely "tolerated" him for years before embracing him as his "official" biographer in 2006, Martin has picked through this...
Castle by J. Robert Lennon
 In his previous -- and best-known -- novel, Mailman (2003), J. Robert Lennon, a connoisseur of misanthropy, recounts the disintegration of a postal worker with faded dreams of glory as a physicist. Even as he makes his appointed rounds each day, fifty-seven-year-old Albert Lippincott detests his...
The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips
 Is that the author you hear chortling with pleasure in the background of The Song Is You Arthur Phillips' delight in his latest compulsively playful novel is almost audible -- and certainly contagious. He has managed, in four very different books in vastly divergent settings, to harness his flights ...
Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of more than 850 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. To learn about how to join, click here.
| 
Don't Miss
