Set in a small village in Haiti, Claire of the Sea Light is a novel about loss and hope. Ville Rose has a long history of poverty and hardship. A few prominent families run the town, the school and local businesses, but the vast majority of its inhabitants are poor. The novel begins and ends with a poor widowed fisherman named Nozias and his seven-year-old daughter Claire Limye Lanme — Claire of the Sea Light. Nozias’ wife Claire died giving birth, and Nozias has struggled […]
Fractured Fairy Tales: The Robber Bridegroom
This short novel is a delightful mix of fairy tale and tall tale, with a healthy sprinkling of both humor and the macabre in it. The cast of characters includes a doting father, a wicked stepmother, a lovely daughter, a dashing but deceitful suitor, Mike Fink, a band of thieves and a hick named Goat. If you enjoyed Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird or Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, The Robber Bridegroom should be on your reading list. The tale begins in antebellum Louisiana with […]
Mrs. Dalloway
I’m on a quest this year to read 50 books by 50 women writers (in honor of my impending 50th birthday and #ReadWomen2014), and as I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf, this felt like the right time to get to it. Mrs. Dalloway is a short novel by Woolf that covers the span of one day, marked by the hourly tolling of the bells. I would characterize it as having stream-of-consciousness narration, with the narrators switching from one to the next as they encounter […]
Women Behaving Badly (i.e., like men): The Scarlet Sisters
Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin were two sisters famous/infamous in American social and political circles starting in the 1870s. While most would think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony when it comes to women’s rights, suffrage and reform, these sisters were renowned orators whose lifestyle fascinated and irritated the general public, especially men in power. They were from the wrong social class and espoused scandalous (for the time) views on sex, women, the poor and wealth. And they were linked to one […]
“I’ll Get You, My Pretty!” ~ Boy, Snow, Bird
This highly acclaimed new novel by Helen Oyeyemi has been called a modern retake on the fairy tale of Snow White. In fact, it is a fairy tale that deals with tropes common to many fairy tales: wicked stepmothers, abandonment, evil forces that prey on innocent young girls, curses. But the overriding theme is female beauty, particularly society’s predilection for whiteness. We imagine beauty as powerful and empowering to those who possess it, but it frequently engenders fear and malevolence in others, resulting in endangerment […]
A Tale for the Time Being
A Tale for the Time Being is a novel about Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, writers and readers, writer’s block and reader’s block, hate and love. It moves fluidly through the past and present and involves some dynamic and admirable female protagonists. Small wonder it was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize (and should have won instead of The Luminaries). The narration moves back and forth between Ruth, a present-day middle-aged writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia, and Nao, […]