Book Reviews and Criticism
The Utopian Turn in YA Lit
— The Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2020.
ELAINE ARCHER, the 16-year-old protagonist of kt mather’s debut YA novel, Rage is a Wolf, is an angry young woman. It all starts with the viral video of a suffering sea turtle that scrolls up on her phone one morning as her mom drives her to the tony Chicago high school she attends. “You know the one,” she prods the reader, “[t]he one with the straw shoved so far up its face, you couldn’t believe it was actually a straw.”
East of Eden: On Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites
— The Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2019.
MURDER IS AMONG the most ancient of human stories. Take just a few steps east of Eden and you stumble right into murder: Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden and, the next thing you know, there is Cain raising his hand against Abel in the fields…
Treasures on Earth and in Heaven: On Briallen Hopper’s Hard to Love
— The Los Angeles Review of Books, May 2019.
IN THE MIDDLE of the 19th century, appalled by what they decried as the “slavery” inherent in monogamous marriage and the selfish striving endemic to the nuclear family, a small circle of my New England ancestors chose to bow out of both.
Again? Again: Reading Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering
— The Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2018
THE FIRST TIME Leslie Jamison goes to an AA meeting, in a church basement, in the dead of an Iowa winter, she imagines one thing she doesn’t need to worry about is the group circle, where each member sips on burnt coffee and takes a turn telling the story of their addiction. After all, she is a professional writer, with an MFA from the most prestigious writing program in the country and a published novel under her belt. She tells stories for a living. But in the middle of rehearsing her tale, one old-time circle member blurts out: “This is boring!”
Tough Little Numbers: Women and the Art of Criticism
— The Millions, April 2018
1.
Swept up in the wave of resignations and mea culpa that rolled through the literary establishment at the height of the #metoo movement late last year was Paris Review editor Lorin Stein. Stein stepped down from his post on December 6, 2017, amid an internal investigation into his treatment of female employees and writers. After he was tapped for the job in 2010, Stein had garnered media buzz as the Paris Review’s “new playboy,” according to a 2011 New York Times profile, a fixture of the glamorous, boozy New York literary life hired to reboot the magazine’s cool quotient. It turned out otherwise.
Double Binds: On Morgan Jerkins’s This Will Be My Undoing
— The Millions, January 2018
1.“When I was ten,” Morgan Jerkins writes in the essay that opens This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America, “the only thing I wanted to be was a white cheerleader.” She has trained for this. Her mother taught her to mind her blackness, to keep it under wraps unless she is in all-black company: at church, or a family cook-out. In the “wider white world,” her mother warns, she must mind her dialect, keep her voice down, tame her hair, fasten up her clothes. “If I wanted to achieve any kind of success,” she was schooled, “I first had to recognize that success was a white domain.”
The Alchemy of Pain: Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me
— The Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2017
SIGMUND FREUD SPENT most of his life asserting that the biological instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain was the motive force of all human action. Civilization was nothing but the process by which the instinctual id — all drive, all desire — learned to accommodate itself to the “reality principle,” to accept “pleasure deferred or diminished” in exchange for a place at the table of polite society.
Imaginary Children: Belle Boggs on The Art of Waiting
— The Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2016
IT IS SPRING when Belle Boggs first realizes she may never have a child, and nature suddenly appears rife with signs of fertility. Cicadas unburrow from their 13-year sleeps; eagles nest in a tree near her farm house; the North Carolina Zoo announces that their female gorilla, Jamani, is pregnant. “What is all this juice and all this joy?” Gerard Manley Hopkins muses in his aptly titled poem, “Spring,” and Boggs may well have wondered the same thing. The “vibrating, whooshing, endless hum” of the male cicadas’ mating song is so loud that, “a man calls 911 to complain because he thinks it’s someone operating machinery.”