There are no twists of the traditional sort in Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, but there are a stack of stories that weave themselves around each other before ultimately tying a knot that can only truly be appreciated on the reread.
Tag Archives: Lovely prose
‘Spear’ Hits Its Mark
If you have the least bit of interest in swords or knights or daring deeds, you can’t miss with Spear.
‘Gentrifier’ Asks Tough Questions Wrapped in Cozy Experiences
Whether she is the gentrifier or isn’t, the perception stubbornly remains that the presence of “[her] whiteness” is linked to upward mobility for the neighborhood by many.
‘Bones’ a Disturbing, Enlightening Account of Violence and Injustice
Kimmerle doesn’t dwell on the violence; her focus is on telling the story without elaboration or obfuscation to best communicate her belief that every scoop of dirt contributes to long-overdue restorative justice for the dead, the broken, and their families.
‘Archive’ Alternates Between Magical and Heartbreaking
The Archive is a novel, but its parts, while interconnected, are fit together in such a way that they can be separated from each other. But all of these parts, though excellent on their own, come together to make a whole far grander than their sum.
‘Babel’ a Fascinating Course in Linguistics and Labor
Although Babel takes place in the first half of the nineteenth century, the message about colonialism and a supposed superiority of one country or race is one for today. So is the eventual turn toward solidarity among the outcasts and the working class.
A Different Kind of Chosen One in ‘Grace’
The Chosen One is a staple of the fantasy genre, especially in YA, but it’s the attempts to contort or subvert it that I tend to find the most compelling. Emily Thiede stretches the trope like silly putty in her debut, This Vicious Grace. Alessa was chosen by Dea to be this generation’s bearer ofContinue reading “A Different Kind of Chosen One in ‘Grace’”
‘Harvest’ Gives Bumper Crop of Chills
Rural towns and wide-open fields have proved fertile material for horror stories for decades. What moves in the corn? Nothing good, probably. But in Ann Fraistat’s What We Harvest, it’s what’s underground—what’s in the very soil—that you have to watch out for. The farmland that 16-year-old Wren’s family has worked for the last six generationsContinue reading “‘Harvest’ Gives Bumper Crop of Chills”
‘What Moves the Dead’ a Creepy Gothic Horror
The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher‘s take on Arthur Machen’s short story The White People, has still left me, three years after reading it, uneasy around dolls and deer skeletons (which, to be fair, I encounter more often than the average person). The picture on the cover of What Moves the Dead was of a mangled-ish rabbit andContinue reading “‘What Moves the Dead’ a Creepy Gothic Horror”
‘Crane Wife’ Questions Identity, Relationships
No close relationship is totally straightforward; that’s impossible whenever two people entwine themselves around each other for whatever purpose. But romantic relationships, and the relationships we have with ourselves as beings who may get into romantic relationships, are fraught with all manner of expectations and suppositions—often implicit and inherited from our families and/or the societyContinue reading “‘Crane Wife’ Questions Identity, Relationships”
Ring Reads 