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Nutritional Yeast

 

Lane leaves church early Sunday morning. Her heel gets stuck in a patch of gum just between the curb and a pile of dog shit sifted through the grass. Lane hates church. This is the place where she is always likely to get stuck in something smelly, that drags its way through the rest of her day, the rest of her life. Lane’s hair is not thoroughly brushed, and her only decent dress is in the wash, so Lane wears jeans. No one wears jeans to Sunday Mass. Lanes mother would be extremely ashamed. Lane should not attend church to appease her mother. Lane should not not wear jeans to appease her mother. Lane has to remind herself that she is an adult, married woman.  But Lane can’t think about that now. She’s in a hurry because if she doesn’t get to Dot soon enough he’ll sell his food stamps to her sister for half the price because Dot has always favored Tracey.  Even though he calls Lane the good cousin. Lane doesn’t try to understand Dot. 

             Lane imagines the kind of horrible person that he is, the kind of deplorable things she’d heard he’d done to his ex-wife (the cheating with teenage strippers, the drinking, the unnerving antics he attributed to his bipolar disorder) before she took the girls and left to another state. Lane wants to displace the feathers coming from the hood of his coat, into a perfect bow around his neck, that she could pull into a choker, and squeeze. She’s concluded that he’s another kind of person that she can just think away. She blinks and he’s gone.

            At his apartment, a government funded studio above a convenience store in the wrong part of town, Dot is still standing there with his hand on her shoulder, thinking about how much of a bitch she’s always been to everyone. Constantly keeping her own family at a distance, as if she’s too good for the people that know the real her. He pushes his fingers a little bit to dig into her skin, because everyone knows how Lane is about being touched. He knows the twisted direction her mind will go to no matter what. He wants the unrealness of her hatred for him to be grounded. He’s not some sicko, just because he and her sister have always been closer, just because Tracey is less socially inept. Just because his marriage had turned out to be a joke.  

            Lane stands waiting. Lane would prefer to sit, but Dot’s only furniture is a pull-out bed that he hasn’t made in days.  

            She maneuvers herself away and starts stretching like an uncomfortable cat trapped under a dresser. Her voice comes in a mumble, asking about the EBT card. Her cousin responds in a variety of self-affirmed body language expressions. They are not very good with each other. Just noises and movements and a runaway type of feeling filling up the spaces between them.

            Lane thinks about her husband Samuel, and how embarrassed he would be by this very stupid transaction if he found out. It’s fraud to sell or buy government issued food stamp cards from your cousin, especially the ones you don’t even like. 

            “You’re quick. Another minute or two and Tres woulda had em.” 

            “Yeah, I figured it,” Lane responds with a shrug.

            “How ya been”

            “Good yeah, just church and Samuel and school, thinking about going back to school.” 

            “Yeah, that’s what’s up. You always were the smart one”

            Lane makes a noise with her throat that’s supposed to be a laugh, but she’s nervous. Even around family she’s terrified of being complimented. 

            “Sit down, take a load off”

            “No, I actually I have to get going, you know”

            “That’s too bad” 

            Dot puts his hand on her shoulder again and squeezes there. The squeeze, at first painful, turns into a massage. Lane’s heart rate elevates. She thinks of a time on the playground when she was younger an older boy pushed her into the pile of wood chips across from the sandbox, just because he was bigger, and he could. 

            “Dot…”

            “yeah…”

            “The card?”

            Lane turns her neck a bit, does some faux stretches, and taps her foot impatiently. 

            “It’s just Samuel, yeah you probably can’t see but he’s out, he’s in the car waiting. It’s so fucking cold, you know”

            Dot nods, and tilts his head. 

            “The money?”

            “Oh, shit, yeah, hold on,” Lane reaches into her purse and pulls out two twenties and a ten. 

            “That’s good for a hundred, the pin is my birthday.”

            “Okay, cool, great, yeah, yeah good seeing you. We have to do something sometime? Like a cookout or something?”

            “Definitely.”

            Lane makes her way to the door. 

            “Wait, Lane you mind dropping me at the spot?”

            “Umm, well….. I, ha, ha, yeah, sure, yeah come on.” Lane waves him over and they go down the rickety stairs until they reach the bottom. The sun spits sweat onto her forehead, even through the snow. Lane buckles herself into the seat and starts driving before the car warms up. Neither of them bring up Samuel’s obvious absence. They ride to a local smoke shop five blocks away and Dot gets out to talk to the other alkies. They all huddle together and pitch in dirty quarters and dimes for a few bottles. Dot pulls out half of the money Lane has just given him. He is popular with the crowd every month when he brings in his only earnings, the fruits of trading his EBT for cash. Lane expects him to call her in less than a week after he’s drank himself silly and is finally hunger again. 

            Lane wants to become vegan. Actually, Lane’s husband wants to become vegan. It’s all he talks to her about. It’s the only thing left that excites him. Lane wants him to stay as excited as possible. Lane will bring him vegan food, but Lane will not pay full price for it, because she knows that by dinnertime he’ll want meat again, and Lane will have budgeted that too. 

            Lane takes the EBT card to the grocery store and assembles everything Samuel has mentioned on his list from unsweetened coconut chips to some cheese substitute called nutritional yeast (a flakey foodstuff she instantly doesn’t trust) and loads of avocado-avocado everything-into a cart with squeaky wheels. Lane fears Samuel’s diet will be deficient in protein. She sneaks a can of tuna into the cart and hides it under romaine hearts. 

             Lane imagines Samuel’s excitement over her choice of non-dairy cashew milk. She pictures him kissing her with strands of spaghetti squash still on his lips. There they are in the tv room nibbling on pita chips covered in hummus and artichoke. She wishes that he would eat meat again. That he would curdle her up and smooth her with olive oil until her toes and fingers are slippery and dip her into a chai seed egg wash, until she’s smothered in a crumble of crushed almond flour and bake at four hundred degrees. 

             In line, Lane stacks all of her items in a neat row and asks that the can of tuna be bagged separately. 

             “Cash or card?” The lady at the checkout asked between munching on chewing gum and pushing her neon orange colored hair behind one ear.

              Lane slides the card. There’s a beeping noise. She stares blankly at the cashier and slides it through again. The screen should have prompted her to enter her pin, but there’s nothing. She swipes for the third time. 

              “I’m sorry ma’am, this card has insufficient funds.”

              Lane lifts her eyes to the people in line, some staring, some waiting impatiently, some just smiling along in long conversation, their carts: props with barely any items, enjoying the heat of being inside out of the cold. Lane returns her eyes to the lady holding her vegan goods hostage. Lane is not surprised at this woman, or Dot. But, Lane wishes she would release them to her out of some goodness in her heart, but Lane knows that people are not good. Dot is not good. Samuel is not good. Lane only tries to be. 

               Lane wants desperately to believe in change. She wants to believe in her marriage, in Samuel. Samuel is the only thing that makes her feel safe. She wants to believe in the vegans. And although Lane had made it clear to Samuel that his indecision over meat was not something that they could reasonably afford- that to constantly trash perfectly good meat, and then stack up on substitutes that would never measure up (that he would never even eat) was wasteful, and that she would no longer be indebted to his miscalculations- she pulls out the last of her cash from her purse and pays full price. 

Shaniece Rattler is a first year graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who is busy writing non-stop. In her free time she likes to read new short stories recommended to her and she daydreams about getting the novel she’s working on published. “Nutritional Yeast” is her first publication. 

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Once in Many Blue Moons

 

Read full story here

Daniel Bartkowiak lives in Chicago. His work has been featured in issues of The Write Launch and Thrice Literary. 

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A Mother’s Love

 

Alice’s mother, Leila, leans in close to her daughter and plucks a stray hair from in between her eyebrows, causing Alice to flinch slightly. She studies Alice’s pale face and finds a few more imperfections to pluck away.

“There,” she says when she’s finished. “Much better.”

Alice lets out a deep sigh as her mother trades out her pair of tweezers for a hairbrush and begins gently brushing out Alice’s glossy golden hair.

This is Leila’s favorite part of the nightly routine that she has with her daughter. She loves Alice’s hair, loves the honey blonde color, one of the few things passed down to her from her father. She’d inherited her mother’s dainty nose, almond-shaped hazel eyes, but her hair was one hundred percent her father’s.

“I can do this myself, you know,” Alice tells her.

“I know,” her mother replies. “But I don’t mind doing it for you. Besides, whenever you brush out your hair, you do it too quick, too hard, and you give yourself split ends. You don’t take your time with it like I do.”

She continues brushing, a small content smile resting on her lips, until Alice’s hair is silky and tangle-free. She runs a hand through her daughter’s hair, letting it waterfall down her nightgown-clad back.

It’s been like this for all of Alice’s life—just her and her mother. She has no siblings and never got the chance to meet her father. He died before Alice was born.

Alice’s mother doesn’t like to talk about her father. She doesn’t like to talk about anything that reminds her of that awful night when that masked man broke into her house and took her husband away from her. She doesn’t like to remember how dark the man’s eyes were—black almost—as they looked at her through those two tiny slits, lying there in bed, trembling hands clasped over her pregnant belly. She knew that if she hadn’t been pregnant, he would have killed her too. She could sense it in the way he stood there, hesitating, before finally turning and walking away, stepping over her husband’s crumpled, bleeding body, laying in the doorway to their bedroom. In a way, Alice had saved her life.

She could hardly believe it when Alice was finally born two months later. A beautiful, healthy baby girl. So soft and pure. She knew she had to keep Alice safe the way that Alice had done for her.

Alice watches as her mother puts the brush and the tweezers back in their designated spots on her vanity.

“Hey, mom,” she says.

“Yes, dear?” Leila replies.

Alice breathes in deeply, her heart fluttering anxiously in her chest, before she begins. “Julie, from school, is having a couple girls sleep over at her house Friday night and she invited me to come.”

The sentence comes out in one single breath. Alice watches as her mother’s back tenses up. For a moment, she says nothing.

“Mom?” Alice says.

Her mother turns around now to face her, an unreadable expression on her face. “Sweetheart, you know how I feel about you spending the night out.”

What little hope Alice had built up drains immediately and is replaced by the sinking feeling she’s become so familiar with. This isn’t the first time Alice’s mother has turned her down. There have been birthday parties, trips to the mall, other sleepovers, and even school field trips that Leila refused to let Alice attend.

It only got harder as she grew older. Every time Alice would go to school on Monday morning and hear all the girls in her classes talking about what they did over the weekend, envy would prickle under skin, constricting her throat and tightening around her chest. All the girls at school got to go to the mall on their own or go see movies on their own. Meanwhile, Alice’s mother didn’t even allow her to have access to cable or the internet. “Too many ugly things out there,” Leila had said when Alice asked why she kept these things from her.

“But mom,” she pleads. “I’m sixteen. Everyone else gets to spend the night out. Why can’t I?”

“Just because other people do things doesn’t mean that you should too,” Leila remarks evenly. “I don’t even know this Julie or her parents. How can I possibly allow you to spend the night in the home of people I’ve never met? What kind of parent would I be then?”

She moves away from the vanity to pick up the cardigan Alice had thrown on her bed. As she moves to the closet to hang it up, Alice rises from her seat and follows her.

“Well what if you meet her parents?” she asks. “Then could I go?”

Leila hangs up the cardigan, avoiding her daughter’s gaze, then turns and walks back towards the vanity, her narrow shoulders squared and rigid.

“Mom?” Alice says, continuing to follow her around the room.

Leila comes to an abrupt halt in front of the vanity, her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides.

“Alice, I am done discussing this with you,” she says firmly. “The answer is no. Do not bring it up again.” She turns on her heel and walks out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Alice hears the clickof her mother locking it from the other side.

Alice’s chest begins to grow tight. Her teeth grit together behind closed lips and angry tears well up behind her eyes. She wants to scream. She’s sick of being stuck in this house with her mother all the time. The only time she ever gets to leave is to go to school or to flute lessons or on her daily walks around the neighborhood, which would be wonderful if they weren’t always accompanied by her mother.

But Leila would never let Alice go out walking alone. She tells her it’s because Alice is a young, beautiful girl and bad things tend to happen to young, beautiful girls like her. She tells her it’s for her own good, for her safety, but Alice doesn’t think that all these rules and restrictions were put in place for her benefit.

When she was younger, she trusted her mother when she told her that going outside alone was too dangerous or when she told her that she kept her door locked so that no bad guys could break in and take her in the middle of the night. She assumed that it was normal to have a lock on the outside of her door, that all little girls’ parents locked their doors to protect them from bad guys. But as she grew older, she began to wonder if the lock was to keep bad guys out or if it was to keep her in.

Once, her freshman year, she met a girl named Haley in her algebra class. Haley had an older brother and he was planning to throw a party one weekend because their parents were going to be out of town. She invited Alice to the party, but Alice declined the invitation, telling her that there was no way her mother would ever allow her to go, so Haley suggested that she sneak out of the house. This was when Alice mentioned the lock that her mother had put on the outside of her bedroom door. Haley stopped talking to Alice after that.

A lot of girls eventually stopped talking to Alice when they realized that she’d never be able to hang out with them outside of school. Julie was different though. She was a transfer student who had just moved here this year, and she didn’t know about Alice yet. She didn’t know her as the weird girl whose mom always drops her off and picks her up from school or the girl who is never seen by any of the students outside of the walls of their high school. To Julie, Alice was just a normal girl. And Alice was determined to keep it that way.

 

The next day at school, Alice told Julie that her mom wouldn’t let her sleep over unless she talked to her parents, so Julie wrote down her mom’s cell phone number on a piece of paper that she tore out of her notebook and gave it to Alice to take home to her mother.

That night, Alice made sure not to flinch or pull away when her mother plucked a stray hair above her lip. She held her hand out straight and flat while her mother filed her nails so that the tops formed smooth little half-moon shapes, and she sat perfectly still, shoulders back, while her mother ran her brush through her long blonde hair over and over again.

Now, as her mother finishes up with their nightly routine and turns to walk out of Alice’s room, Alice rises from the stool at her vanity.

“Mom,” she says. Leila stops in her tracks, pausing for a moment before turning around.

“Yes, dear?” she replies.

Alice goes over to her backpack and pulls the slip of paper with Julie’s mother’s phone number on it out of the front pocket. She walks over to her mother and holds the paper out in front of her.

“This is Julie’s mom’s phone number. I thought that maybe if you gave her a call and talked to her that you’d be more comfortable letting me spend the night there tomorrow.”

Leila stares down at the piece of paper in her daughter’s hand, her thin lips set into a hard line. She sucks in a deep breath through her nose and snatches the paper up.

“Alice,” she begins, her voice chillingly calm, “I told you last night not to bring this up again. If you don’t want to listen to me then not only will you not be spending the night at Julie’s; you also will not be going to school tomorrow. I’ll call your school to let them know you’re sick and I’ll bring your work home for you to do.”

Alice’s heart sinks like a rock into her stomach. She can’t do this. School is the only time away from her mother that Alice gets. It’s the only time Alice ever really feels free. She can’t take that away from her.

“Mom, no! That’s not fair! I have to go to school!” she cries. Tears begin to well in the back of her throat.

Her mother crumples the piece of paper up into a ball inside her boney hand. “Well maybe next time you will listen to me when I ask you not to bring something up again.”

She turns on her heel, her silky pink robe billowing out behind her, and walks out of the room. “But mom!” Alice shouts, following behind her. Leila slams the door and Alice’s hands fall onto the white painted wood.

Click.

 “Mom!” Alice shouts, banging on the door with balled up fists. She jiggles the handle, but it doesn’t budge. “Mom!” she shouts again, louder this time, the words like sandpaper in her throat.

Classical music floats up from downstairs, the volume increasing until it drowns out her screams. She kicks at the door, her bare toe instantly throbbing as she does so. She lets out a guttural cry and turns around, her arms shaking at her sides.

Alice pushes over the stool that sits at her vanity, throws the brush and the tweezers and the lotion and the nail clippers and file all to the carpeted floor. She tears the pink, frilly comforter off of her bed, followed by the pressed white sheets. Takes all of her neatly folded clothes out of the drawers of her dresser and tosses them on the ground. Removes all of the shirts and sweaters and dresses from their hangers.

When she’s finished, she looks around at the mess she’s created, sweat prickling in the pits of her arms, on the back of her neck, causing her nightgown to stick to her skin. It isn’t enough. All of this stuff can be cleaned up, put back in it’s place as if it was never out of place to begin with. It isn’t enough.

Alice walks over to her closet and kneels down, pulling out her box of art supplies from the back corner of it. Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 fills the pastel pink walls of her room, the walls of the house. She takes the scissors from the box and goes over to the vanity, turning the stool upright and sitting down on it.

She stares at herself in the mirror, at all of her beautiful blonde hair, long and silky and smooth. The hair her mother loves. The hair her mother brushes each night. The hair that’s just like her father’s. She grabs a chunk of it and begins cutting. She cuts and cuts until it falls just below her ears, jagged and ugly.

She stares into the mirror and smiles.

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Still Lives

 

The LA art scene sets an eerie scene for Maria Hummel’s crime novel, Still Lives. This book driven by murder, art, and societal commentary that not only leaves the reader with a good story, but a lot to think about as well.

Maria Hummel tells this story through Maggie Richter. Maggie is the in-house editor for the esteemed but struggling Rocque Museum. As the museum prepares for the impending, provocative show “Still Lives” by artist Kim Lord, Maggie’s narration leaves the reader with a sense of tension: as we soon learn, her long-term ex-boyfriend has been dating Kim Lord. Maggie squeezes into a too-tight dress borrowed from a co-worker and attends the gala anyway, despite her intense desire to flee the scene. Both the notion of seeing her ex, Greg, and Lord’s paintings of female murder victims puts Maggie on edge. Everyone anxiously awaits the artists’ arrival at the party but are eventually let down by her absence. The next day it is discovered that Kim Lord is missing.

Hummel’s poetic language and imperfect narrator propel the story forward, making the reader feel as though they too are solving the sudden disappearance of a notoriously unpredictable artist. One can not help but be suspicious of every character, including Maggie.

Readers of Still Lives will be suspicious as well as a bit unnerved as Hummel expertly describes the paintings of Kim Lord. The artist poses herself in the positions of infamous murder victims. Maggie questions Lord’s work through the book: “I hate this artwork. I hate the powerlessness it projects. I hate it because it reminds me there is an end for women worse than death. I will not look at it again.” Hummel paints a picture even better than the artists of her book, using a language unique to L.A. and the back-of-the-gallery experience, which Hummel knows first hand as a writer and editor for L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Hummel’s examination of society’s reoccurring habit of fetishizing female homicide victims will leave readers questioning the media and themselves.

 

Reviewed by Jessica Powers.

Counterpoint. 2017.
IBSN: 9781619021112.
277 pages.

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We Are Okay

 

Life is made of transitions; of countless moments that carry us from one point to the next. More often than not, stories focus on these transitions, because transitions incite change, and from change comes tension. In her fifth novel, We Are Okay, author Nina LaCour (Hold Still, You Know Me Well, Everything Leads to You) cultivates a particularly strong sense of tension that ebbs and flows over the course of only 234 pages. This tension is possible because of the state of transition in which LaCour has placed her characters—both mentally and physically. The story is subtle and relatively reserved, allowing those various, emotional states of transition to accentuate the unstoppable nature of change; though there are some constants that even a complete metamorphosis can’t shake.

We Are Okay follows Marin, a Freshman at an unnamed East coast college, as she spends her first winter break alone in the dorms. Though we are in Marin’s point of view, the details as to why she has no one to stay with on Christmas are fuzzy—all we know is that she can’t stay with her grandfather, whom she lived with back home in Los Angeles. She won’t be completely alone, however. Marin’s best friend from California, Mabel, is coming to stay for three days, but Marin’s relationship with Mabel is even more complicated and clouded than her relationship with her grandfather. Over the course of these three short days, we are exposed to the emotional toll that isolation and major changes have on Marin and, through seamless jumps in time, we learn why so much has changed in the first place.

At the novel’s start, Marin finds herself in a classic state of transition: grief.

Moving from a life with something into a life without it. Marin grieves for her home, her relationships, and the way her life used to be. LaCour expresses Marin’s grief through isolation; isolation not only from other people, but from Marin herself. She is in denial, unable to face the things that she grieves. But what has happened to her—the secrets that are kept from us—pulls at Marin constantly, and it forces her to acknowledge her past piece by piece. This isolation and silence allow Lacour to keep valuable information from the reader until it is time for the story—and Marin—to reveal it. The result is an exquisite push and pull of tension. Her readers are tantalized by the dramatics of the story, but we aren’t allowed to actually understand them until the last possible moment.

LaCour uses another classic transitional period to her advantage as the story is developed: going to college. Leaving home, starting a completely new phase of life, is something that everyone can relate to. Nothing creates more tension than taking a character out of their comfort zone and placing them somewhere completely new.

LaCour takes this transition and takes it a few steps further. Following the mysterious events that take place at the end of the summer, Marin drops everything and leaves for college without a single goodbye. She hasn’t even packed her things, arrives at school completely empty handed. Not only does LaCour take Marin out of her comfort zone, she takes away anything and everything that Marin could use for comfort. Additionally, she sends Marin to school on the opposite side of the country. The subsequent transition is jolting and does everything it can to take the readers out of their own comfort zones as well. Which leaves us completely open and susceptible to the profoundly strong variety of emotions that the story provokes.

When I read this book for the first time, I was so overcome with emotion that I didn’t quite know what to do. I found myself sitting on my bathroom floor late at night, crying uncontrollably for seemingly no reason at all. All I knew was that this book had struck every single chord that I could possibly have had. It left me feeling as though I had been violently scrubbed clean; everything in my head came pouring out at once. Months (and several rereads) later, I find it a bit simpler to articulate what this book has done for me. It is real in a way that I’ve never seen before. It perfectly translates the emptiness of depression and the strangeness of transition to the page. It is magnificently written—the pacing, details, and dialogue all working in seamless harmony. It is a million other things that I may not ever be able to write down. We Are Okay is equally striking and soft, simple and surprising; it takes its readers somewhere that I highly doubt they have ever been before.

 

Reviewed by Katherine Martin

 

Published by Penguin Random House 
ISBN: 9781524749941
234 pages

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All Out

 

Saundra Mitchell edits an empowering and inclusive anthology of queer historical fiction in All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages.

 

            Queer people have always existed, but their stories, lives, and loves are silenced and disregarded in most mainstream history teachings. Due to this erasure, countless queer figures have gone unrecognized. All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages eases the pain of this loss. Featuring an impressive list of accomplished Young Adult authors from all across the queer spectrum, All Out aims to fill the hole in the hearts of queer youth who see nothing of themselves in history or in literature.

            This collection of short stories spans several hundred years and as many continents as it does genres. Varying in content, form, and length, this expansive anthology contains something for any reader of any age. Drawing from medieval witch trials, the death of Kurt Cobain, to the lesbian subculture of fifties Hollywood, All Out leaves no setting unexplored.

            Beginning with an interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood, “Roja,” written by YA author Anna-Marie McLemore, All Outreimagines the stories that consumed our childhoods. A trans male character takes the forefront of McLemore’s retelling, as well as in Elliot Wake’s “Every Shade of Red.” In Wake’s contribution, Robin Hood himself is a trans male. One of the most celebrated figures of English folklore is celebrated as a trans boy, giving power to the trans readers who are able to see themselves in the role of a legendarily masculine character.

            But not every story in the All Out anthology is a reimagining of fantastical tales. Some are painstakingly accurate. In Mackenzi Lee’s short story “Burnt Umber,” a young boy navigates homophobia as an artist’s apprentice in Amsterdam in 1638. Unable to act on his desires—and nearly outed when his longtime crush models nude for a study in anatomy—Constantjin struggles with the realities of his situation. Lee’s detailed observations of an artist’s environment in seventeenth century Amsterdam must have required extensive research in order to remain historically accurate, a fact which does not go unnoticed. Similarly, Malinda Lo’s “New Year” includes references to a very specific queer subculture outside of Chinatown in San Francisco where “male impersonators” performed. Lo even includes an author’s note, providing her source material and suggestions for further reading and research.

            From lesbian chambermaids in eighteenth century London to an asexual roller skater in Maryland in 1976, All Out is an inclusive anthology for any member of the LGBTQ+ community.

            The inclusivity and imagination in this anthology is immensely empowering to any queer reader, especially queer youth, who with this collection, can finally see themselves as a part of history. Saundra Mitchell’s masterpiece is a celebration of queer identities and proves the positive power of representation.

Review by Jerakah Greene

           

Published by Harlequin Teen
ISBN-10: 133547045X
ISBN-13: 978-1335470454
368 Pages

Twitter: @SaundraMitchell @LAAnnaMarie @themackenzilee @malindalo @HarlequinTEEN @HarlequinBooks

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My Year of Rest and Relaxation

 

Ottessa Moshfegh is one of those writers whose stories stay with you long after you finish reading them. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, is no exception.

In this novel, the narrator (she remains unnamed throughout the book) decides to take some time off from life by attempting to go into a year long hibernation aided by the many different pills she gets her psychiatrist to prescribe to her. On the outside, her life seems great. She’s thin, gorgeous, well-educated, and has tons of money thanks to the inheritance she received after her parents passed away. But on the inside, things are pretty dark, and she thinks that taking a year to reset will help her wake up from her hibernation renewed and ready for a fresh start.

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories.”

This novel is both dark and hilarious, unfiltered and relatable. We all have been at a place in life where we’re just so tired of going through the motions that we want to clock out for a while, to take a week long nap and escape the facileness of our everyday lives. It’s one of those common secrets that everyone experiences, but no one talks about. That’s the type of writer Moshfegh is, the type who is unafraid to talk about the things that no one else dares to shed any light on.

While there is some repetition in this novel (taking pills, blacking out, getting a visit from her envious best friend, Reva, going to see her psychiatrist to see what else she can prescribe her), it never feels monotonous or boring. In fact, the repetitiveness helps put you in the narrator’s state of mind, making it easy to get lost in the hazy world that Moshfegh creates for her.

There are many times in the novel when the narrator is portrayed as cold or crude or unlikable, but no one is pleasant all of the time. Showing this character at her darkest moments, showing how she behaves when no one else is around, is comforting in a strange way. It reminds us that we are all human and it’s okay to not be okay sometimes. Too many stories have a protagonist who is so easily likeable and so undeniably good. It’s refreshing to read about a protagonist who is just as imperfect and fucked up as the rest of us.

This isn’t one of those stories that is necessarily pleasant or lighthearted. However, it is one of those stories that grips you until the very end. It is honest and raw and does not hold back. If you do not want to read something that talks about shit or pubic hair or blowjobs, then this story may not be for you. But if you want to dive into something that does not play it safe or aim to be politically correct, then you should absolutely check this novel out.

Reviewed by Alexis Bowe

Published by A Perigee Book/Penguin Group
ISBN: 0525522115
304 pages

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Anatomy of Thought-Fiction

 

Joanna Demers shows what a fictional future has to say about life in the 21st century with her newest novel, Anatomy of Thought-Fiction.

It has been said a nausea-inducing amount of times that hindsight is 20/20. This cliché is deeply rooted in individual self-reflection, the act of looking back at one’s own life to make some amount of sense of all those years. But what of collective self-reflection? What about the hindsight of society writ large? What does the future have to say about the present? Joanna Demers tackles these questions with her bizarre novel Anatomy of Thought-Fiction.

To fully unpack this piece of academic fiction, one has to first look at its construction. This book consists of a series of academic essays on the nature of popular music sandwiched between an editor’s introduction and a postscript. The editors, anonymous representatives of the Center for Humanistic Study, exist in the year 2214 and have graciously received the unpublished manuscript titled Anatomy of Thought-Fiction from a descendant of its author, Joana Demers. They have published it in its entirety and without editorial as part of their mandate “to study the discourse of the “humanities,” which apparently went extinct sometime around 2040. This information is all laid out in the introduction, while the postscript asks what might be learned from an academic long dead in a field “deemed to be ornamental and irrelevant”.

These two points, the introduction and the postscript, are the only bits of fiction in this work. And all they really do is provide a scant amount of detail to why Demers’ manuscript is being published in the first place. This is what makes Anatomy of Thought-Fiction so brilliant: with a total of five pages, Demers is able to wholly construct an Orwellian and post-apocalyptic future world that seems just as unrelenting, bleak, and harsh as George Miller’s saga of the Road Warrior (that spans four feature-length films) or Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale. Her creation of this world resides solely in what representatives of a clearly totalitarian regime have to say and in the imagination of readers. She offers no long histories of how the present became this future, no long-winded passages about violent upheavals and civil unrest, and most important of all, no heroes riding in to save humanity from this.

There is a complete trust in readers on display in this work to be able to connect dots and extrapolate from very little data, a kind of trust that normally doesn’t show up in a lot of commercial fiction. This trust that Demers fosters between herself as a writer and her readers can be explained by her actual profession as a professor of musicology. She is a professional academic at the University of Southern California and expects readers to be up to the rigors of her research. The essays that make up the bulk of this book are well researched, well argued, and while they stray into philosophical inquiry at times, would no doubt find a good home in journals of musicology. Demers wasn’t trying to write articles in her main field of study, but was attempting to show that what holds up study in the humanities is a thought-fiction.

Demers defines a thought-fiction as a concept that serves a purpose even though it is known to be untrue. She applies to this term to a wide range of beliefs held by many in regards to popular music and how those beliefs, while helpful in some regards, can easily be argued away. She also acknowledges that nobody is immune to thought-fictions; from the get-go, Demers admits that she too believes in ideas she knows to be false, an admission that immediately endears her to readers because she implicitly states that it’s okay to believe these things. This concept of thought-fiction can be applied to so many ideas that are wholly outside of popular music and musicology, disciplines even outside of the humanities. As the editors ask in their postscript, “We, in turn, can ask ourselves by what thought-fictions we govern our lives.”

Joana Demers has done more than just craft engaging fiction or write academically about her own field of study. In Anatomy of Thought-Fiction, she has successfully married the research article with bleak totalitarian fiction in such a way that readers will have a hard time not believing in the future she has created.

 

Reviewed by Jay C. Mims

Published by Zero Books, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78535-381-9
138 pages

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Calypso

 

Calypso by David Sedaris is yet another hilarious recounting of his life with his partner Hugh, his abundant siblings, and all the strangers he judges. However, this time he puts his focus on times spent at his vacation home on Emerald Isle. Throughout these instances, Sedaris rocks the readers’ worlds with laughter, shock, and laughter again.

            The book starts with the story of how he came to buy the Sea Section, a stilted house on a resort island in North Carolina. As a child, his family would go to Emerald Isle every summer, and every summer, his father would wistfully suggest buying their own property instead of renting every year, but he would never follow through. Finally, after the tragic death of one of his sisters, Sedaris buys a house on the coast so that his family can come and be together on Emerald Isle whenever they want. Of course, for most people, this would be the “and they lived happily ever after” moment, but the Sedaris family isn’t that sort of people.

            Sedaris goes on to recount almost every gathering at the Sea Section since it was purchased, describing fights with his prudish mother-in-law, conversations that turn into naps with his father, and being crushed by his 12-year-old niece at Sorry, the board game. The stories become more outlandish and vulgar as they go on, especially the running storyline of Sedaris’s quest to feed his own (thankfully removed) tumor to a snapping turtle. Nothing is too taboo for this book, not even gastrointestinal viruses or the things one sees on Intervention, which gives this book the classic Sedaris voice.

            Sedaris takes a lot of time in his book to talk about family and how the dynamic has changed throughout the ages. At the start of the book, he expresses how when his family visits him in England, he often leaves them be for long stretches, afraid that they’ll get sick of him if he lingers too long. After the purchase of the Sea Section, however, he seemingly spends more and more time with his sisters, his brother, and even his father. The biggest show of growth comes at the end, when Sedaris visits his father, the person he was never close to as a child, at his childhood home. Sedaris also discusses his regrets concerning his family, such as never confronting his mother’s alcoholism, and his relationship with his sister Tiffany.

            Overall, Sedaris charms his readers with his stark prose and wit, and he wins us over with his relatable experiences and emotions. If you’ve ever had a partner, a family, or a bad thought about the person in front of you in line at the grocery store, you’ll like Calypso, and if you felt physically ill after the election, sometimes do good things just to look good, or enjoy learning how people in different countries express their road rage, then you’ll love Calypso. Grab a copy today and prepare to experience the snarky, honest world that is David Sedaris’s life.

 

Reviewed by Danielle Uppleger

 

Published by Little, Brown and Company, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9 (hc) / 978-0-316-39236-5 (large print) / 978-0-316-39239-6 (international tpb) / 978-0-316-52482-7 (signed edition)
259 pages

 

Instagram: @david_sedaris
Facebook: David Sedaris

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The House of Broken Angels

 

Big Angel is gathering everyone for one last birthday party, and your invited!

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Luis Alberto Urrea begins The House of Broken Angels by simply thrusting the reader into the world of the de La Cruzes without much context, but within the first few pages, we learn that Big Angel, the family patriarch, is on his way to bury his one-hundred-year-old mother the day before his seventieth birthday, which will be his last as his body withers from cancer. The de La Cruzes family tree is then explored throughout Big Angel’s final birthday party–a setting that dominates a majority of the novel–as he has invited everyone who he possibly could. In order for one to see the family tree though, the reader must be highly attentive–in a way one would be if surrounded by strangers in an unknown area–of every character, their dialogue, and interactions with one another. While Urrea tasks the reader with puzzling various names and relationships together, he sums up how long the La Cruz family has lived in the United States early on, when Big Angel and his family drive past a “Build the Wall” sign.

“…the de La Cruz family has been around here since before your grandparents were even born.”

As the family tree of the de La Cruzes begins to unfold, so do the problems that come along with each character. Many of the problems and encounters that are explored begin with the issues of border-crossing back and forth between Tijuana and California, but move toward issues that are contemporary and of high importance to Mexican-American families. For instance, there are two characters who find themselves ostracized for long periods time for reasons that are still common today. Little Angel finds himself ostracized from his half-brother, Big Angel, and others in the de La Cruz family because he is biracial: he is half-white and half-Mexican. Little Angel is often considered too white, a gringo, to Big Angel and the elders of the de La Cruz family; on the other hand, Little Angel is viewed as simply Hispanic by all others outside of the family. For example, Little Angel is involved in a scene with a Target shopper telling Little Angel that he will be deported soon. All the while, Yndio, Big Angel’s oldest step-son, disappears from the family for many years after Yndio’s non-cisgender identity is revealed to Big Angel and the rest of the de La Cruz family.

Other issues explored by Urrea involve military recruitment practices and assimilation to unknown aspects US culture. Lalo, another one of Big Angel’s children, is solicited to enlist in the military with the promise of a pathway to US citizenship but is deported to Mexico after serving in Iraq, having to reenter the US by crossing the border. This leads to drug-abuse and other outbreaks of symptoms related to PTSD that neither Lalo nor his family seem to be aware of. Big Angel’s American born nephew Marco, a metal-head who goes by the alias of The Satanic Hispanic, doesn’t interact much with the de La Cruzes at Big Angel’s party, but is smitten with a blind girl named Lily.

While the main story focuses on the de La Cruz family and many of the challanges they face, there are moments of beauty that may go unnoticed, such as Big Angel’s lifelong marriage to his wife Perla, a couple that seems to remain in love with each other as if there were teenagers after decades of marriage, or the way that the de La Cruz family is able to find some level of reconciliation amongst each other without any more dignity ravished from one another.

The House of Broken Angels is a novel that appropriately veers between heavy moments of disaster and beauty, with small dashes of humor, to serve as a testament to the struggles that many Mexican-American families face–many of which that are hardly discussed, but are all too real and common. This novel provokes the discussions ignored, while at the same time, finding a way to humanize the perceptions of immigrants, immigration, non-cisgender identities, and those attempting to balance a multiracial identity.

Reviewed by Carlos Joshue Reyes

Published by Little, Brown and Company on March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-0-316-15488-8
336 Pages