By JK, on March 14th, 2011 Sometimes you pick up a book, and it’s like a song on the radio that you don’t realize you needed until you’re singing along. At the end of this dreary February, that was certainly the case with Jessica Grant’s excellent debut collection Making Light of Tragedy (Porcupine’s Quill, 2004). I’m already a fan of Grant, having loved her Come, Thou Tortoise last year, and this volume only enhanced my admiration.
What makes all of Grant’s writing stand out (and, I dare say, almost immediately identifiable) is her imaginative, playful, slightly off-kilter perspective. Take her wonderful description of the days of the week: “Days are places we inhabit. Tuesday, for instance, is a tower. Friday, a schoolhouse. Saturday, a runway. Sunday, an empty park. The light is different in each. We are different in each.” She also doesn’t shy away from occasional flights of fancy (like a woman who believes time travel is possible if you follow 4 steps ending with “Crying on Television” or a ski-jumper who takes off never to land).
Making Light of Tragedy offers up a collection of irresistibly endearing characters bordering on neurotic, from irascible (not to mention irresponsible) book reviewers to know-it-all roofers. [...]
By JK, on January 10th, 2011 With the New Year still fresh on our minds, it’s that time when we take stock of our lives. It’s a time of hope and ambition, of making goals and hoping we can evolve into better people (or at least shed the dreaded Christmas Cookie Weight). So it seems an appropriate time to talk about Colin Beaven’s No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. If the book-length subtitle didn’t give you a good idea of what the book’s about, here’s the crux of it: One Manhattan-dwelling man decides that for one year he will try to live in a way that has no impact on the environment (and he’ll drag his wife and 2-year-old daughter along too.) Naturally he blogged about it too, and still updates his site post-project. I like books about people who do radical things (see reviews of Beyond the Horizon and Blind Descent for proof of this assertion), and environmental topics are of great interest to me, so I thought this book [...]
By JK, on November 17th, 2010 SPOILER ALERT: This review contains some serious spoilers. Often I try to work around them, but this time I thought it was necessary to the discussion I wanted to have, so if you haven’t read it yet, go do it, and come back later! </Spoiler Alert>
Imagine that your world is 11 feet by 11 feet. Your only sunlight comes from a small skylight, and TV is your only connection to the outside world. The only person you’ve ever known in your Ma. You were born in this room, and you’ve never been able to leave. But also, you’ve never really felt you needed to.
This is the world of five-year-old Jack, the narrator of Emma Donoghue’s much-lauded (and justly so) Room. Room got a lot of media attention because the story of Jack and his mother was inspired by the true story of Elisabeth Fritzl, an Austrian woman imprisoned in a basement cell by her father and forced to be his sex slave for 24 years. But Donoghue cannot justly be accused of exploitation, for while Room‘s inspiration may be stripped from the headlines and may be what makes the reader’s heart beat faster, its lifeblood is its fascinating study in [...]
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