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rain, rain, go away

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

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Is there anyone who isn’t at least slightly maddened by days and days on rain? I’ve spent many summers working outdoors under mostly temporary cover. It’s been years, but I vividly remember the feeling of perpetually wet socks and bones that felt internally chilled. In the summer of 2008, when I was working as an adventure guide at a camp in the White Mountains, it rained 29 days in June and 30 days in July. We ran out of “rainy day” activities less than a […]

true story: my parents were called in for a meeting with the guidance counselor when I wrote a poem about bog sacrifices in third grade

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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…which I learned about from reading Spider magazine. Ghost Wall kicks off with a young woman being led to the peaty gloom before snapping back to a modern teenager forced to reenact the Iron Age with her father and the massive chip on his shoulder. Clocking in at a mere 130 pages, Ghost Wall bridges the expanse from ancient Britons to bored college students. Sarah Moss’s prose is sparse but lush; months worth of meditations shift and shimmer through the fog of just 130 pages.   A theme reigns supreme throughout […]

Men Are Terrible and Cannot Be Trusted

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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Ghost Wall is a story about Sylvie, a seventeen year old girl, dragged along on an Iron Age reenactment in northern England with her father, Bill. Bill’s enthusiasm for the Iron Age is a hobby; he isn’t traditionally educated in the subject, and jumps at the opportunity to join Professor Jim Slade and his students for what is essentially a two-week summer LARP. He brings his wife, Alison, and his daughter, Sylvie, along for the ride. It becomes obvious early in the novel that Bill […]

Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts…

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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This a deeply haunted book in a very disturbing (but not explicit) manner. It’s a coming of age novel and it involves a teenage girl kind of maybe slowly learning that she might be Queer by watching an older woman be an older woman, treat her earnestly, treat her well, and care for her. So that’s the thematic pitch for this novel. The plot, however, involves a summer archeological/anthropological primitivism study where a group of college lecturers, students, and a family who’s just into it […]



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