What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

Posted on October 13, 2023 by pagesofjulia

I continue to wrestle with Oyeyemi, whom I admire but who leaves me confused as often as she leaves me delighted. I think this is the one I like best (of whose I’ve read), alongside or just below Gingerbread. It definitely had its more challenging stories, but finished strong, and maybe that’s the win: leave me on a high note.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is, first of all, a great title; it is also a short story collection whose contents I thought unconnected until rather late in the game. There are a few recurring characters, actually, but their relationships across stories are limited. It’s mostly disconnected. There is a linking subject or theme: keys, and locks. In some stories they are literal and physical, in some more metaphoric, and in a few the reader has to think a bit to make the concept fit (like an ill-fitting key, ha), but it will. I like that as a through-line.

“books and roses” introduces a couple who are lost to each other, whose keys open doors to a garden of books and a library of roses. “‘sorry’ doesn’t sweeten her tea” contains many fascinating ideas and sub-stories, but it’s mercurial in its focus, quickly shifting which character we seem to be watching; I was actually charmed throughout, but left pretty baffled, too… unlike some stories, it at least left me in a place that felt like an ending. “is your blood as red as this?”, the longest story in the collection, left me less satisfied – like, what just happened? I can handle feeling this way occasionally, but if it gets too frequent I’ll become frustrated or lose interest.

But soon came “presence,” which also put its reader through some fast switches, but left me again in a place I felt a little surer footing. “a brief history of the homely wench society” and “dornička and the st. martin’s day goose” were both downright delightful, leaving me giggling and tickled and thought-provoked. The first sets out the history of two gender-based rival clubs at Cambridge, and the latter offers a twist on Little Red Riding Hood. After one odder one, we finish with “if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think,” which felt like the perfect note to end on: a little shape-shifting as its setting moves from a realistically boring workplace drama to something decidedly metaphysical, with a neat fable built in, and a magical flourish of an ending. With that taste in my mouth, I feel good about this collection. My overall impression remains that Oyeyemi may be much smarter than I am.

I confess I’m a little comforted that a Guardian reviewer found these stories somewhat uneven; that makes me feel better, like maybe I missed some things because the stories weren’t quite perfect? But I always doubt myself, because Oyeyemi seems to have so much going on. I’m afraid it’s me. I don’t always relish an author making me feel not so smart, but I don’t think that’s what she’s out to do here, and so I don’t hold it against her. I think her imagination may be a bit wider and more flexible than mine. She’s pretty special, and I’ve just ordered the rest of her books that aren’t yet on my shelf, so you can stay tuned and expect that we’ll use the Oyeyemi tag some more.

Rating: 7 comments.

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In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Posted on October 9, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A historian with personal connections to its players expertly researches a specific lynching case in this razor-sharp report.

In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning is a story with personal significance for Grace Elizabeth Hale (Making Whiteness), who tackles some of the greatest race-relations demons–historical and continuing–in the United States. In this thoroughly researched account, Hale investigates the 1947 murder of a man named Versie Johnson in rural Jefferson Davis County, Miss. The author’s beloved grandfather served as sheriff at the time, and her mother originally offered this tale as one of righteous heroism: her white grandfather stood up to a mob and refused to release his Black prisoner, who was somehow nevertheless removed to the woods where he died. But Hale learns that her grandfather’s involvement was neither innocent nor heroic.

In her thoughtful narrative, Hale places the death of Versie Johnson in layers of context. She works to find personal information about Johnson, with limited results: one theme of her book is the lack of recorded facts about people judged inconsequential by the record-keepers. She struggles to reconcile very different accounts of Johnson’s alleged crime (rape of a white woman). She studies the history of lynching in the United States, by its various definitions; the history of Jeff Davis County and Mississippi; and a handful of similar cases in nearby counties before 1947. By the end, she reconstructs a passable version of events: possibilities about the life of Versie Johnson and an estimation of her grandfather’s decision-making on the night he was among the group that drove his prisoner from the town’s jail out to the field where a crowd of white locals witnessed Johnson’s murder.

A historian of American culture, Hale began her research for this book as she finished a doctoral dissertation on southern segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, and white supremacy. She brings this expertise to a subject about which much information has been lost. “Family trees, genealogies filled with relatives’ names and the dates when they were born and died, depend on archives. And official repositories of documents in turn depend on a society’s ideas about who matters.” Research skills and informed guesses (always clearly indicated) do, however, yield a story. “The past does not have to be ancient to be made of splinters and silence,” Hale writes, and what she reveals is important for a national reckoning as well as Hale’s personal one.

In the Pines is elevated by lovely writing: “Family trees are metaphors. They share with pines both a basic structure and a tendency to flourish only when conditions are right.” It is also marked by incisive thinking about race in history and in the present. Hale’s work is a significant contribution to that larger conversation.

This review originally ran in the September 18, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 unrecorded details.

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Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy

Posted on October 6, 2023 by pagesofjulia

It felt right to follow the outstanding Soil with Trace, which my father recommended some years ago. I wondered if this might be one of the books Dungy was looking for. It’s not in fact “radically domestic” enough, I think, to fill the void Dungy located–she did so well to write the book she wanted to see in the world. But Trace has its own special offerings that are equally rare and needed.

I am inclined to read this as a collection of closely linked essays, rather than chapters in a memoir or nonfiction monograph. It combines human history, natural history, studies on race, memoir, and nature writing; it ranges across the United States but always interrogates from a personal perspective what it means to be a non-white American in the natural world. [The author is Black and Native American.] Savoy is a gifted and lyric writer, to boot, investigating literal landscapes as well as figurative ones, keeping metaphor handy. I loved her consideration of the book’s title, which is a word that recurs.

The landscapes she travels and studies include the Grand Canyon’s Point Sublime; the Canadian Rockies; Oklahoma’s “Indian Territory”; a Wisconsin island; Washington, D.C.; Arizona’s border with Mexico, and more. She interacts with a wide range of literary voices, including Victor Frankl, Aldo Leopold, Homer, Thoreau, and Louise Erdrich. The front cover offers a New York Magazine reference to John McPhee meeting James Baldwin in Savoy’s voice; I was reminded of Eula Biss in how she pulls seemingly disparate threads together (those places and voices) to make exactly the point she needs to make. It’s impressive, precise, gorgeously written, and smart. She’s a professor of environmental studies and geology, well equipped for this exploration. A few of the ideas that really resonated with me I’ve collected here:

If the health of the land is its capacity for self-renewal, then the health of the human family could, in part, be an intergenerational capacity for locating ourselves within many inheritances: as citizens of the land, of nations even within a nation, and of Earth. Democracy lies within ever widening communities.

How a society remembers can’t be separated from how it wants to be remembered or from what it wishes it was–that is, if we believe stories of ancestors reflect who we are and how we came to be. The past is remembered and told by desire.

There’s a lot here that I’m still thinking about.

Rating: 7 chickadees.

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Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences by Jedidiah Jenkins

Posted on October 2, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A loving but troubled mother-son relationship takes center stage during a great American road trip in this reflective memoir about family.

In Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences, Jedidiah Jenkins (Like Streams to the Ocean) presents both a literal and psychological voyage–and an investigation into family and tolerance.

Jenkins, nearing his 40th year, is troubled by his relationship with his mother: loving but fractured by her inability to accept his identity as a gay man. In November 2021, following the Covid lockdown, he undertakes a trip with her that he hopes will help them address their disagreements. The same journey will allow reconsideration of an aspect of her life that Jenkins paid little attention to. In the 1970s, his parents, Peter and Barbara Jenkins, walked across the United States, as famously documented in a series of books (including A Walk Across America and The Walk West) and National Geographic articles. As mother and son retrace those steps by car, Jedidiah wishes to learn more about his mother and her worldview; see the countryside and strengthen their relationship; and perhaps, finally, bring her to terms with his identity.

In driving from Tennessee to New Orleans and cross-country to the Oregon coast, Jedidiah (who lives in Los Angeles) and Barbara (whose best friends come from her Nashville Bible study group) struggle with what to listen to in the car–she likes Glenn Beck, and he likes NPR–what to eat, how to pray. Eventually, they will discuss the question that’s been weighing on the son’s mind: “Would you come to my wedding if I married a man?” Barbara’s conservative political and religious beliefs pose an obstacle to the love and acceptance that he craves from her. Their attempt to bridge such a divide feels relevant in polarizing times; the challenges faced by this loving but fundamentally diverging mother and son may resonate with many families.

Jenkins’s prose is unadorned, but his reflections are elemental ones about family and the static and changing aspects of relationships: “a mother’s influence is difficult to excise. It is not like the scorching sun. You cannot shade yourself from it. It is more enveloping and inescapable, like the air you need to survive.” By the memoir’s end, much is unresolved about the lives still in motion, but Jenkins has found his own peace, and learned a bit about the landscapes of his home country and his family background. Mother, Nature, a loving ode, suggests that the questions will continue to present themselves and that the journey toward discovery is worthwhile.

This review originally ran in the September 11, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 baby elephants.

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The Stolen Throne by Abigail Owen

Posted on September 29, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Book two in the Dominions trilogy picks up where The Liar’s Crown left off. Meren continues to carry the weight of great responsibility, even over her twin, Tabra, who is ostensibly the “real” princess – now queen – half of their twinship. Tabra carries the privileges and Meren the hard work. We don’t resent Tabra for this, however, because she is so sweet. In fact, I’m inclined to say she’s a bit too sweet – a little boring and a little less realistic than our hero, because if Meren is sometimes frustrating, she’s also a realistic teenager, as well as a brave, hard-working young woman, fighting for the good of all the people in her world, and growing up at the same time. In this installment, she realizes what good friends she has – even if some of them betray her. And she’s still navigating love, romance, and sex. There are still the two young men in her life. One is her lifelong best friend, Cain, who wants to marry but whose love tends toward overprotection and limitation. And then there is Reven, who represents risk and danger to Cain’s security, but for whom Meren feels actual fireworks; also, the two of them are bound (magically) by their trauma and having saved one another’s lives. That drama progresses here, as does the larger drama of risk to Meren’s very world and the people she (or is it Tabra?) rules over and is responsible for.

I find the interpersonal dramas more compelling than the magic in this series; the amulets, goddesses, monsters and political machinations are trappings, or framing, for the interactions between people (and gods, Shadows, monsters, etc.) that interest me. Which is not especially a criticism, but an observation. I returned to this world in search of a comfort read, and in spite of danger and death and violence and all that, I absolutely find it here. I appreciate Meren’s struggles and the push/pull she feels with Reven, especially. I remain invested in these characters and am looking forward to book three, which is promised for April of 2024.

Rating: 7 glimpses of golden thread.

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Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story by Max Marshall

Posted on September 25, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This investigative narrative of fraternity members turned drug dealers–and worse–exposes unsavory aspects of college life.

Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story is Max Marshall’s investigation into the series of arrests and criminal charges related to fraternities at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and the individuals involved. A press conference during the College of Charleston’s 2016 summer break caught the attention of Marshall, a journalist, recent college graduate, and fraternity member himself. Mug shot photos showed five fraternity members and three friends. “They looked like guys who put in time at the gym, and maybe at the beach, and definitely at the putting green,” Marshall writes. These eight young men were accused of selling a variety of controlled substances, including Xanax, which, as police chief Greg Mullen put it, seemed to be “a drug of choice right now.” According to authorities, this case was also related to the recent murder of another fraternity member. Intrigued, Marshall follows the story of those eight arrests and the changing cultural identity of Greek organizations in the United States.

Among the Bros focuses on Mikey Schmidt, a Kappa Alpha, to whom Marshall spoke via a series of contraband cell phones as Mikey served 10 years without parole. Age 21 at the time of his arrest, Mikey is one of the flashiest characters in the story Marshall unearths, and he receives the most serious sentence of the group. He and his best friend, Rob Liljeberg III (also a Kappa Alpha), form the backbone of Marshall’s reporting. They put human faces on an investigation into the intersection of Greek life, drug dealing, and criminal activity by a particularly privileged and overwhelmingly white male demographic.

Over the course of four years, Marshall consulted police files, court transcripts, and other documents, and conducted more than 180 interviews with 124 sources. The narrative he presents is sad, deeply disquieting, and often sordid. The fraternity members he interviews all deny using date-rape drugs but allow that others around them do. He meets with one fraternity alumnus who describes mixing gin, Mountain Dew, Xanax, and cocaine–and then tries to sell Marshall his financial planning service. “When I asked an SAE [Sigma Alpha Epsilon] what his friends did the weekend after the Mother Emmanuel killings, he said, ‘Things just aren’t going to stop…. As insensitive as it sounds, it’s still Friday.'” The portrait these anecdotes paint is not flattering, but Marshall remains compassionate, sympathizing with the pull of belonging, and the promise of like-minded friends.

Among the Bros finishes without moral lessons or final conclusions, instead aiming to clearly report events that will disturb most readers. Combining excellent journalism and deftly paced storytelling, this chilling tale lifts a veil on a decadent and troubling lifestyle.

This review originally ran in the September 8, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 brand names I had to look up.

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Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy

Posted on September 22, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others.

This is the best book I’ve read this year.

Soil has an appropriate subtitle, succinctly naming some of the most important elements of what it offers. Camille Dungy is Black, a woman, a mother, and she is determined to grow a garden in the backyard of the home she moves to with husband Ray and daughter Callie in 2013. Their new home is in Fort Collins, Colorado, an overwhelming white city in an overwhelmingly white state*, which is also Dungy’s home state. “Black people are, and always have been, planted everywhere in this country.” They come from California, where Callie was born; Ray is from New York.

Dungy, a respected poet and academic, comes to Fort Collins to teach at Colorado State University. She has always appreciated gardens, gardening, flowers; she comes from gardeners. As a Black person, and as a woman, she has no choice but to track the unjust and frightening trends in the world around her. As a mother, she must balance her work life – her entire life – against the needs of a child. These intersections of identity define the experience she describes in this book, which is a memoir of gardening, as a Black mother, in Fort Collins, in the United States, in a time that includes the 2016 election, the COVID pandemic, numerous murders of Black Americans by police and vigilantes, climate change and environmental degradation, and increasing wildfires in the American West. These are a few of her concerns. In the same sense that every space is political and every person with an interest in humanity’s direction is politically engaged… of course gardening is about race. Everything is about race. “One thing always leads into another here,” she writes, but that’s everywhere, too.

I see this book as a braided essay, in chapters. Dungy chronicles her life, and snippets of Ray’s and of Callie’s, mostly in terms of her garden; but gardening is inextricable from the history of Fort Collins, of Colorado, of the country, of Black Americans. She interrogates history and also literature, particularly nature writing, whose tradition is overwhelmingly white, nearly as overwhelmingly male, and largely free of domestic details, as in, do any of these people ever do laundry? Did you know John Muir had a wife and kids? “What folly to separate the urgent life will of the hollyhock outside my door from the other lives, the family, I hold dear. My life demands a radically domestic ecological thought.” Annie Dillard receives special attention, as does poet Anne Spencer. Dungy writes about the fear her family feels on the night of the 2016 election, and the fear they feel–achingly, that her young child feels–when they hear yet another story like that of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was killed by police in Aurora, Colorado in 2019. It’s all interconnected.

The craft of Dungy’s braid is exquisite, and her points are razor-sharp, wise, true. Because she’s a poet, her writing is obviously strong, too, lyric and imagistic and color-saturated and lovely. She wields metaphor to great effect. “Some large part of gardening, like some large part of living, is figuring out what to cut and when.” It’s just an all-around beautiful book. It made me cry, and it made me pause; it wasn’t always joyful, because nothing true is. Whew.

“I am no angel,” writes Dungy, about her own failure to live flawlessly with regards to “build[ing] a more equitable and sustainable world.” Nobody’s getting it exactly right, but we should still try. Similarly, she wrestles with being a gardener and nature lover when there’s so much she doesn’t know–but she’s learning. “When I told Ray I didn’t know the proper name for the broken digging tool, he didn’t laugh at me. He accepted the fact that I am still and always learning.” (This is one of the attributes I love most in a human: to be still and always learning. Also, there are some sweet notes about a good marriage in this book, too.)

On the simplest literal level, I loved Dungy’s writing about her garden. She works to reclaim the yard of the house they purchase from sedately manicured garden plots, lots of lawn, and river rocks over plasticized landscaping fabric. The aim is to restore more native plants and those that will be drought-resistant, pollinator-friendly, and friendlier to more wildlife in general. These are goals I share in principle, at my own little house, but in practice I’m pretty daunted by the work involved. I do not love the work of gardening nearly as much as Dungy does, and she is honest about how much work it is. I wish I were more like her, in this respect and others. It’s inspirational.

Thank you, Liz, for the recommendation. Like its lovely dust cover and endpapers (I had to go back and tell Liz, who listened to the audiobook, to get a print copy!), this is just a gorgeous book.

Rating: 10 blooms.

*84.5% and 86% “white alone,” respectively, according to the 2022 US Census Bureau QuickFacts sheets for city and state.

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Julia by Sandra Newman

Posted on September 18, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This feminist retelling of Orwell’s 1984 brings the original’s philosophies, wit, and horror to modern readers with a strikingly reinvented protagonist.

Julia returns the timelessly relevant world of 1984 to readers’ attentions with a female protagonist more clever and feeling, and perhaps more cynical, than George Orwell’s Winston Smith ever was.

Sandra Newman’s retelling matches closely Orwell’s familiar and disquieting original. Big Brother is the leader of the nation of Oceania, at war with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?). Telescreens squawking nonstop propaganda constantly observe every move of the Citizens of Airstrip One, formerly London. Where Orwell offered Julia as colleague, lover, and co-conspirator to his antihero, Winston Smith, here Julia Worthing gets a backstory.

She grew up in Semi-Autonomous Zone 5, previously Kent; had her first affair with a Party member at the age of 14; and won a Hero of the Socialist Family badge for denouncing her mother (a more complex story than it immediately sounds). As an adult, Julia works in the Ministry of Truth’s Fiction Department as a mechanic, repairing and maintaining the machines that design plots for the mind-controlling entertainment of the masses. “She was perpetually fascinated by the plot machinery,” Newman writes, but “about the books that were the end result, she knew little and cared less.”

Julia lives a straightforward, self-serving life, outwardly obedient to Party regulations and a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, but is secretly involved in a number of minor sexual affairs, trading in black-market goods for the simple pleasures of real chocolate. Though fond of Winston in some ways, she has no illusions about the possibilities their narrow world allows them and lives mostly at peace within her limits. Newman’s version does not differ from Orwell’s in these particulars, but it does expand Julia considerably, and appealingly, as a character increasingly wrestling with not only the contradictions between lived experience and the Party’s narrative but also questions of right and wrong. “Anything was possible when one was never told the truth.”

Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star) offers a tragic and harrowing story in lovely, evocative prose, revealing all the ugliness and beautiful possibility of a world hopelessly scarred by hate and manipulation and yet, somehow, still capable of hope. Julia is double-, triple-, and quadruple-crossed: “All was false. It was known to be false, but everyone lied about the lies, until no one knew where the lies began and ended.” Electrically memorable, Julia is as startling and incendiary as 1984 ever was, with dark humor and pathos commenting on perennially timely questions.

This review originally ran in the August 31, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 questions.

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Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff

Posted on September 15, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this darkly atmospheric novel set in a futuristic Dublin, a young woman fights for justice in an oppressive society ruled by fear during a zombie-like apocalypse.

Sarah Davis-Goff’s Silent City centers on a young woman faced with impossible choices in a post-apocalyptic version of Dublin. “To me, banshees are heroes. I saw images of banshees growing up at home on the island, women dressed in black, warriors. The ones who fight the skrake. HERE TO PROTECT, the grimy posters said.” Orpen was raised by her two mothers on an island devoid of other humans and, crucially, of skrake: monsters that bite, infect, and kill. The skrake “takes up your body and uses it like a puppet. Fast, vicious, strong, with long sharp teeth, the skrake is like a child’s bad dream.” Following the death of her mothers, Orpen ventures into a world she knows nothing about. She is bent on survival in this terrifying landscape of zombie-like beasts.

In the dystopian city that was once Dublin, she becomes a banshee, a member of the entirely female troops of paramilitary security forces ostensibly meant to protect, but actually used by “management” (entirely male, sinister, self-serving) to forage for supplies and keep other lowly citizens in check. Wallers work night and day, repairing and rebuilding the city’s walls against the skrake; the roles of farmers and breeders are equally humble. Banshees work in pairs: Orpen has found a surreal closeness and loyalty with her partner: “I never saw a woman who wasn’t sometimes beautiful, but Agata always is.”

The zombie apocalypse represents a possibly overdone subgenre, but Davis-Goff (Last Ones Left Alive) takes her readers into fresh territory here. Orpen’s struggles are not merely survivalist; raised with only two human companions and little context for other relationships, she must learn to chart new loyalties, friendships, and partnerships against existential questions of right and wrong. The city claims to provide protection and sustenance but, in fact, uses the banshees to commit atrocities and to exercise control over a subdued population, frightened into total silence lest they excite the skrake. Orpen and the women she serves alongside–all guilty of cruelties under orders–must balance loyalty against justice. “Those who can still feel for another, we feel it. I have to believe we do. I have to believe there are enough of us to change the world.”

Silent City is grim but hopeful, tackling questions of risk, trust, courage, morality, and sacrifice. Davis-Goff’s prose is stark but lovely. A strong feminist voice, austere circumstances, and a resolute sense of integrity make this dystopia memorable and inspiring.

This review originally ran in the August 25, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dreams.

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Mudflowers by Aley Waterman

Posted on September 11, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this reflective debut, young artists in Toronto form a love triangle with both transcendent and painful results for all.

Aley Waterman’s sensitive first novel, Mudflowers, follows a young woman exploring intimacy, biological and built families, and art. A love triangle twists and reshapes itself, with both trauma and revelation. “I wanted so badly to love in a good way,” says Sophie, the protagonist and narrator, 27 years old and a Newfoundland native who recently moved to Toronto, where she lives with a misogynistic writer and her best friend since childhood. He is a beautiful man named Alex who is also her on-and-off lover. Sophie sees Maggie reading her poetry at an event and is immediately swept away. Maggie is talented and enigmatic, “with big eyes full of wide highways.” The two become close friends and, sometimes, lovers.

Sophie creates glass mosaics for wealthy patrons, Maggie writes, and Alex works on indie films. They are young artists scraping together livings in a big city, taking drugs amid art events and the bar scene. They slide frankly and openly in and out of sexual relationships. Sophie obsesses over her mother’s death. Alex’s mother left when he was 12, their parallel losses an unspoken understanding. The addition of Maggie to their close relationship, forming a trio, acts as a magnetic force that both imbalances and strengthens the bond. Secrets surface, and the balance shifts again.

Mudflowers follows Sophie to an artist colony at a castle in France and eventually home to Newfoundland. Place is important to this thoughtful protagonist, who is given to contorted philosophic musings. Newfoundland is “the only place I had been to where there is enough space and isolation and distance from the world for people to really be themselves without even thinking about what that meant.” Earlier, she notes that “in cities so many lives are wildly proximate to each other, just divided by a wall here or a door there, but each wall determined some sort of fate, keeping us organized and away from one another.” She wonders: “What if the people who should be most important in life were just separated by a wall, and what if that wall meant those people never met!” Sophie has met the people most important to her, but keeping them together will be another feat.

Sophie’s physical travels are dwarfed by the scale of her cerebral and emotional movements, as she tortuously navigates desire and fear. She is preoccupied with art, how to love, and purposeful attention. “[W]as it how beauty was directed or how it was received that was most important?” she ponders. “How are you supposed to be a real person when you’re also supposed to be the woman inside of someone else’s mind?” She also often considers mothers and their absences: “Maybe we all need more mothers than we have,” she thinks. “Maybe we all need as many mothers as we can get.” Mudflowers is thought-provoking, expansive, and raw.

This review originally ran in the August 22, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 birds.

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