Books by Other Publishers Reviewed by Readers and Writers in Our Community
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[12 February 2012. by Jill Neziri]
Anne Whitehouse, One Sunday Morning. Georgetown, Kentucky: Finishing Line Press, 2011. 28 pages. $14 paper. ISBN 1-59924-750-X
Anne Whitehouse’s newest chapbook, One Sunday Morning, brims with dissonance. A Rothko-esque block of watercolor forms its cover image, suggesting reticence and abstraction while the title, printed in white block letters, conjures images of the church, coffee and brunch. The poems, however, shatter all expectations, as Whitehouse explores everything from death to love to nightmares. Continuously drawing us in with their sharp images of place and time, the poems bring to life the sensations of the speaker and offer surprising glimpses of the seemingly familiar through an innovative eye.
The title piece sets the tone for the book, quickly and mercilessly undermining all associations with “Sunday morning.” No waking late to freshly brewed coffee here – instead, the speaker and her household are torn from sleep by a “deep groan . . . a cry of outrage.” In place of tranquility, fear punctuates their morning. They peer out their window to find the violence of nature on stage before them:
There in the stream was the stag,
And there, on the bank, the coyote
Worrying the stag’s brown-and-white tail
To and fro like a fish in its mouth.
With her impeccable attention to detail, Whitehouse transmits the raw details of the scene – the stag’s tail hangs from the coyote’s teeth. Its antlers are “fuzz-tipped and green,” its eyes, “liquid and brown.” As she watches the coyote flee, followed soon by the lame, dying stag, Whitehouse recasts Sunday morning; no longer a day of rest to celebrate the resurrection, it is now marked by death and violence, which albeit a part of nature, nevertheless shatter the speaker’s sense of safety as well as our expectations.
Other poems throughout the volume accomplish similar re-definitions, drawing us in with the familiar only to offer surprising new visions that entice us to read more. In “Age and Youth,” Whitehouse juxtaposes images of the old and young, depicting the elderly Horace who “plays with the candle flame,/ watching it wave and flicker.” As Horace teases the flame, reflective of his own life, Whitehouse’s line breaks grow shorter and quicker, mimicking the dying candlelight as it gasps for air:
poking it with the snuffer,
nudging it
to see how faint
it will glow
without going out
Noting that “Old age was the terror/ most dreaded by the Romantics,” Whitehouse presents “Acer:/ aged 27” as a contrast. Acer is “Handsome and tattooed,/ With waist-length blond hair.” Thus, we expect him to become a symbol of strength and potency. Instead, though, Whitehouse transforms him into an image of waste and compulsion. We learn that:
he OD’ed one July night
in a hotel room made over
to one of his “hamster nests”
lined with shredded phone books
where he liked to party.
Peering furtively into this scene of self-destruction, we shift our pity and even disgust from Horace to Acer and leave the poem only with the disturbing image of this young man, dead amidst reckless indulgence.
Whitehouse’s most powerful poems are grounded in these sharp, startling images. Yet occasionally, she does deal in abstractions. At their worst, these moments can feel predictable and overwritten, such as in “The Past” where the speaker announces: “Memories reveal/ emotions that bind me . . .” At their best, Whitehouse’s abstractions are themselves fresh and surprising and are interwoven with crisp images to create poems that refuse easy classification as they stir our minds and senses. Presented in three parts, “Meditations in June” does just that, engaging in a constant shifting from thought to thought and image to image as Whitehouse reflects on love, time and death. The poem begins with a fight:
Too often we found ourselves
Rehearsing the same frustrating scene
Dead-ended in recrimination.
As the stanzas shift, so does Whitehouse’s lens, moving readers away from the blank description of the fight yet continuing to characterize it:
The identical weed sprouted everywhere.
Thousands of times I plucked it out
Easily its shallow roots let go of the earth.
Intensely tactile, this second stanza provides a stark contrast to the imageless “recrimination” of the first and is so expertly placed as to make both stanzas essential to the poem. In part three of “Meditations,” Whitehouse accomplishes a similar feat through her use of the line:
As I grow old, I am ever more certain
Of uncertainty.
Here, the suspense, accomplished through enjambment alone, reflects largely upon Whitehouse’s treatment of the line overall. Whitehouse creates poems guided largely by units of breath with occasional shifts that pack a strong punch because of their rarity.
Balancing her personal, reflective speaker with her precise, luminous images, Whitehouse delivers a chapbook that is much more than a simple “Sunday Morning” read. Leaving us with her ruminations – “Love is a mirror reflecting unlikeness” – and her unadorned imagery – “the pink sunset fragmented in the watery eye” – Whitehouse startles as much as she satisfies and adds a strong volume to her growing body of work.
- Jill Neziri is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow at Fordham University. She has published book reviews with Jacket. She is co-editor of the anthology, From the Heart of Brooklyn, and her poems appear there as well as in several literary magazines.
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[28 December 2011. by Ian S. Maloney]
George Rabasa, Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb. Cave Creek, AZ: Unbridled Books, 2011. 324 pages. Paperback, $15.95. ISBN: 978-1-60953-035-8
George Rabasa’s Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb caught me by surprise. The initial framing device for the novel is a letter written from a Dr. Richard Gunderson of the Institute Loiseaux in Woodington, Minnesota, which reveals the untimely death of the narrator and main character of the novel to follow, Adam Webb. This official and stilted sounding letter is followed by a fascinating descent into the mind of a mentally-ill teenage narrator. The first person narration draws you into the world of the Webb family, a fascinating composite of family dysfunction in suburbia, as seen through the eyes of Adam. There is cousin Iris, who catches the attention of young Adam’s teenage sexual desires, and who is reborn in fundamental Christianity while having an illicit affair with her church pastor. Mother Marjorie finds herself giving out socks to the homeless in her ceaseless desire to find meaning by giving to others. Father Albert spends his days endlessly searching the television for news about world events to make meaning of his life. Brother Tedious is driven by self-destruction, willingly participating in underground boxing clubs, and thus echoing the dark searches of a novel like Fight Club. The Webb family seems a wonderful microcosm for postmodern characters searching for meaning to their existences, whether through God, sex, service, masochism, or current events. They fill voids without really finding each other. However, the main focus of the novel is the thoughtful and pained Adam, as he negotiates a trip back into the Institute Loiseaux at the start of the book. What follows is a high adventure when he meets a fellow patient, Francine, who is also on her way to the psychiatric institute. Miss Entropia, Francine’s nickname, captivates Adam’s mind immediately. The unlikely couple steals the Institute’s van, get caught hiding out in a mall parking lot, and begin an improbable love affair. During the story, Miss Entropia begins secretly living in the Webb residence. No one in the family seems to notice or care. The reader is left wondering about Adam’s reliability as a narrator. How much of the novel is real? Is Miss Entropia a figment of his Adam’s unstable imagination?
The novel tenderly recreates a story of mental illness which is poignant and captivating. Adam Webb evokes the memory of a Holden Caulfield; his updated self in Adam is a sensitive library-sorting vegan. He is confused about his gender, well-acquainted with heavy medication, and focused on finding connection with another human being. Adam roams in a strange dysfunctional world, and yet his story draws you into a communion with his search for love and self. While Adam’s death is foreshadowed in the opening pages of the novel, the reader is drawn into his narrative by his undying quest to find his lost love of Miss Entropia (or Pia as she is later called). The novel incorporates email exchanges and chatroom discussions to show the reader an intimate portrait of a young teenager, unable to escape the powerful attraction of his desires and the deep yearning for self-acceptance. The novel provides a moving picture of an atomized family and the consequences of familial alienation. In a stirring foreshadowing of the tragedy to come, Marjorie tells her son: “Am I the only one that has to be an open book? . . . Everyone in this family has a private life. A room of one’s own, some nook where you are unseen and untouched and undefiled” (122-123). Adam’s tragedy is the prison of his privacy – his life is unseen, untouched, and undefiled. In essence, it is a life unfulfilled.
The triumph of this book is its ability to portray those empty nooks in a splintered family with sympathy and tenderness. We’re drawn into Adam’s melancholia, his inability to find true acceptance and love. Adam’s tragedy is brought into focus by his overpowering love for Miss Entropia. Adam needs convertible energy – he needs love and acceptance and above all, purpose. His inability to find purpose allows entropy to accumulate in his soul. Much of his actions in the novel amount to wasted heat. Adam’s tragedy is a given fact from the opening pages, but George Rabasa’s artistic, first person narrative leaves us wondering and musing about teenage isolation, family dysfunction, and lost opportunities.
- Ian S. Maloney, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.
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[22 December 2011. by Mitch Levenberg]
Rebecca Newth, The Pass Key. Illustrated by John L. Newman.Fayetteville, Arkansas: Will Hall Books, 2010. 45 pages. Paperback, $9.95. ISBN: 978-0-9801257-1-9
The other day I was having lunch with my twelve year-old daughter and we were discussing all the subjects in school she liked and disliked, and the one she seemed to dislike the most was history. She didn’t understand why she needed to study history at all and no matter what I told her – history is important because it tells us where we were and how we got to where we are now and who we were and how . . . and what we could be if only . . . that kind of thing which was the kind of muddled abstraction usually reserved for older students-who often don’t get it either.
I wish (now) I had then Rebecca Newth’s little gem of a book, The Pass Key, because then it would be so easy to show why we bother studying History, how history is not just a disconnected series of events and dates to memorize, but as relevant and as alive as the present – that it is always with us – teeming with people just like us. History is an important key to help us understand the past (and hence the future).
As Rebecca Newth shows us in The Pass Key it is not about disconnection but about connection. It is not just learning about those who came before us but connecting with them. As Whitman says in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “It avails not, time nor place – distance avails not” – history is only a locked door away.
It is in the imagination of a young boy.
In this case it is Jake, a young boy living at the present time in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who will – thanks to the magical qualities of an old, rusted key – find himself in the same town 150 years earlier during the Civil War and the terrible ravages of slavery.
This key seems to have a life of its own. It “drew” Jake towards it; it opens his imagination – he imagines it in the past so that the key (the key, of course, is the door to his imagination as much as it is to any door in the house) becomes the very means by which he will enter the past:
“. . . that one key drew me. I picked it because I thought it was oldest and had the most to tell. It looked like the hooves of horses had pounded it or it had been caught in a tractor. Perhaps it had been in the pocket of a soldier and gone through battle. The key might have been lying in the garden, back when horses plowed. The key could have fallen out of a farmer’s overalls . . .” (Newth, 2)
It is here he will befriend – as the reader will befriend – a slave boy, John, whose family is preparing a very dangerous journey of escape.
Before this escape will take place, Jake will experience in person the cruelty of slavery as his friend John suffers a severe whipping at the hands of a white man. Indeed, Jake sees a world he has never seen before – perhaps only read about – which allows him the opportunity to discover his own humanity, his own courage and compassion. It is through Jake, and his relationship with John, that the young reader can experience the triumph and tragedy of the human condition – then, now, at all times, and forever.
Ironically, Jake represents a future of freedom while the slave, John, represents a past of oppression and slavery. It is where these two boys meet, both geographically and spiritually – merging past and present – where the meaning of this book resonates.
And yes it’s true that when my daughter read The Pass Key, she was willing to give history a second chance.
- Mitch Levenberg, of St. Francis College, has recently published three short stories: “The Pen” and “The Line,” which appear in The Same; “The Game Farm,” which appears in the on-line magazine Big City Lit.
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[4 October 2011. by Rachel Kaminsky]
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, Facing Home and Beyond. Long Beach, NY: Paragon Poetry Press, 2011. 99 pages. Paperback, $16.00. ISBN: 978-0-692-01323-6
Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s first book of poems, Facing Home and Beyond, delves deep into the often complicated facets of relationships between husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, which can produce paradoxical experiences of heartache and pleasure. Although Rosenthal’s poems appear highly personal, they also contain universal truths, such as, feelings of pain and nostalgia will often be felt after a loved one is no longer a present figure in one’s life. It is these feelings that anchor her poems into a subject matter that allows for healing and renewal after loss is experienced within a relationship. The speakers of Rosenthal’s poems use people, places and objects in order to invoke memories that hold a new significance when reflected on in the present. For example, in the poem “Her Father’s Eyes,” a “crease” in the “fedora” the speaker’s father once wore, as well as the “…Sunday shine/on his shoes,” are used to contrast his characteristics, which she’ll never experience: “eyes that never looked/into hers.” In the second stanza, the speaker states that if her father had looked into her eyes, and “…gleaned/her smile…” would this “have stopped him/from passing her by?” The final sentiment is that she’ll never know the answer to this question because “the time has passed.” Just like the crease in his fedora, the moments she had with him are forever gone.
Rosenthal skillfully shows us how memory can often manipulate the present, meaning that one might believe for a moment life is still how they long for it to be. Within the poem “On Her Porch” a woman is described as feeling at peace while she sits in a rocking chair after dinner, knowing that inside her home her dog is sleeping soundly, and in the bathtub, “her prince of a husband soaks, /swirls of pipe smoke/crowning his damp, curly mane.” As she continues to rock she becomes aware that it is “nostalgia” which causes her to picture this, and feeling “…alit with old flame,” she runs back inside to a scene that shocks her: “…his majesty’s limp curls, /white—not that bewitching black/in the locket of this once-star-struck girl.” The change in time, from the interior world of the speaker’s mind, to the exterior world of reality, appears abrupt, but it captures how time is a powerful force changing the shape of people and places like a film dissolve. As Rosenthal poignantly states in “Falling in My Neck of the Woods”: “Today’s New York Times, /yesterday’s trees. Branches stir. /Petals fall. Summer.” The above poems are found in section II, appropriately titled, Course of Hourglass Sand. However, I find that in every section time and memory figures prominently, particularly in those poems that deal with the physical and emotional decline of a loved one.
Within the first section, Blood relative, a poem titled, “Logan Square East, Philadelphia, PA” opens with a description of an elderly mother asleep: “…wilting in her Geri chair,/the corners of her mouth cradling oatmeal/I’d fed her earlier…” The image is striking, for the advancement of time has caused a daughter to take care of her mother in almost the same way her mother cared for her when she was an infant. This role-reversal leads to the following reflection: “…A lifetime ago, /she told me she’d been a tomboy. /This stranger, once that girl, once/my father’s bride, wakes, whimpers, /grimaces. Her hands grip the wheelchair.” The speaker cannot reconcile the person her mother has become with the vibrant woman her mother once was; thus she concludes that her mother is a victim of time, which has apprehended her like “a phantom spinner” (an allusion to Walt Whitman’s “A noiseless Patient Spider”) seizing her and “squeezing out the last trace of speech weeks ago.”
A reference to Whitman appears again in this collection, within the poem, “Red, White, and Blue” found in section V, called Red and Other Colors. The opening line states, “Walt, with you in mind, I pen this poem.” What follows is not a longing for a past that is the speaker’s, because her generation is filled “with less and less hope for mankind,” but for an age Whitman memorialized in his poetry. In the present space of the poem, time has had a crippling effect on society—the world appears as a threatening menace compared to the hope-filled days of Whitman. The speaker claims, “…I quake in the timbre of unrest/that would surely wake you in a drench of sweat—/waves of foreboding to darken the optimism/you garnered like leaves upon the greenest grass;” This last line is surely a reference to section VI of Whitman’s Poem, “Song of Myself,” which is a reflection on what the grass symbolizes in a context of the progression of life. In the penultimate stanza of this section Whitman concludes, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, /And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the/end to arrest it, /and ceas’d the moment life apear’d.”
Although a number of Rosenthal’s poems end on a bleak note, it is these poems that account for the first part of the collection’s title: Facing Home. She is confronting the demons that have caused people and places to become victimized by time: A father’s absence and the regret felt by his daughter because he did not fully acknowledge her; dealing with a memory that produces feelings of nostalgia so profound one may believe for a moment that life is the way it was in the past; and a child coming to terms with a mother’s digression when knowledge of her as a young, strong woman still consumes their thoughts. However, in between the poems that express sorrow over that which ceases to exist, there are also those poems which account for a re-birth and a moving forward after disappointment: “A Changing Heart,” “My Leaving Machine is Well-Oiled” and “Daughter, Tomorrow” are a few examples. The most profound poem to exhibit an evolution is titled, “I See.” Written in the shape of a vase, Rosenthal’s speaker refers to herself as a “…blossom sprung/from earthenware and/growing wildly...” In the lines that follow we read how this blossom changes into a “…flower, /pedicle-heavy with dew/seeping into roots deep in soil and/nourishing petals…” Once the flower has obtained all it needs from the soil it breaks free from the stem and “…rides the tail end of a/brusque breeze carrying the flyaway bloom far from/the most steadfast of stems…” The action is highly metaphoric of one leaving their past (their roots) behind once they have dealt with it. The last lines of the poem describe the act of moving on: “…I see myself soaring…/upward, uprooted, free of a dark sapping foundation./A petal flown, destined to land in some un-/broken stream of consciousness.” Here, we read about a future that is promising because the subject is free to travel along a route that is no longer pre-determined.
I find that the above poem (as well as those written in a similar vein) is inspired by Whitman’s reference to the “smallest sprout” of grass, which is symbolic of life not subject to death. What can be gleaned from the above is that death has no bearing on a life that is destined to grow and flourish in its time—to move beyond many deaths that one may have experienced in the past. It is the poems about renewal which account for the second part of the collection’s title: and beyond. This sentiment, as well as a picture of a rainbow above a solitary home on the cover, stands for the promise of a rich and beautiful life after heartache, which Rosenthal has so eloquently depicted in her profoundly moving book of poetry.
- Rachel Kaminsky is a graduate of St. Francis College and Fordham University’s Master of Arts in English with a writing concentration Program. Her poetry can be found in the anthologies, From the Heart of Brooklyn, Volumes I and II.
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[4 October 2011. by Wendy Galgan]
Kevin Brown, Abecedarium. Georgetown, Kentucky: Finishing Line Press, 2011. 29 Pages. $14.00 (paperback chapbook). ISBN 13: 978-1-59924-728-1
Inspired by a book about reading the Oxford English Dictionary from end to end (Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.), Kevin Brown constructs an abecedary of poems using 27 delightful, out-of-favor English words as his titles (there are 27 because he begins with an “Exordium” – an introduction). Just looking at the Table of Contents stirs the reader to speak these words aloud, to enjoy the feel and sound of them even before she encounters their meanings. This is an auspicious beginning to a collection of poems about life, love, and the love of language.
Any book of poetry will have some works that are stronger than others. The difficulty with the conceit behind a collection of linked poems (abecedaries, crowns of sonnets) is that the success of the work as a whole depends, in large part, on the poet not breaking the chain with a poem of lesser strength. By and large, Brown avoids this pitfall (more on the exception in a moment). These are moving, thoughtful poems which address questions of fidelity, honesty and faith. Brown’s obvious love of the English language lends a stately quality to much of the writing. This should not be read as a criticism; rather, it indicates a thoughtful way of engaging the reader with her own (and the poet’s) emotions.
This engagement got off to a rocky start, however, when I encountered a grammatical error (not poetic license) in the first stanza of the introductory poem. “Not a good omen,” I thought to myself. Indeed, if I had picked up the book to read for pleasure, rather than to review it, I might have put it back down again and moved on to another collection. Luckily, as I continued to read through the poems, Brown won me back and I decided to chalk the unfortunate mistake up to a typesetting error.
In the end, I am glad I did so, for the collection is lovely. “Calenture” evokes the summers of childhood, where boys could “lie // in the grass beside our friends, be lost / for days, weeks even” and the problems of “bullies who battered // our egos as well as our bodies” and “middle-school / romance, rules more complex // than any sailor’s knot” would disappear in the long, lazy days which seemed to stretch on forever. The turn in the poem comes with the speaker’s admission that “Now I know true / concerns – my body breaking down” with “mortality circling / me like a pirate,” and he longs “to hide / in that grass one last time” and wait to hear his friends once again.
In “Occasionet,” Brown paints a portrait of everyday grown-up life, with the “minor occasion” of the title being not a meal served to guests on “the china / your grandmother gave us” but rather “leftover lasagna with / a center that is not as warm as we / would like.” Each sentence begins with the word “Today,” and this use of anaphora serves to reinforce the idea that this is a poem about a moment in time, and that moment is not “a day for pictures” or “a day for your yearly hat,” but rather a day to drink “lukewarm soda because // the ice maker has broken yet again.” In this poem, the turn plays on that not-quite-hot lasagna, leaving the reader with the image of “a hidden hurt” (between the speaker and the “you” of the poem) starting to heal, their “hearts warming slightly, / like cheese melting in a microwave.”
That melting cheese hints at a playfulness that is most in evidence in “Heterophemize.” Here, Brown allows himself to play with the English language, with delightful results. The poem begins, “You are my noun, / I set out to say” but the speaker “verbed // instead, stammered / out adjective / after adjective, but spoke / so adverbly you // exclamated.” This is a couple for whom communication, connection has become nearly impossible, and Brown’s mischievousness with the language deftly illustrates this: “I thought / we were gerunding / well, but you saw nothing / but a split infinitive.” Lighter than the other poems, yes, but “Heterophemize” presents and strengthens – without preaching – the argument at the heart of Abecedarium, an argument that states that language is at the very heart of human interactions.
While the idea of language and communication is also present in “Terriculament,” this is the one poem I believe weakens the chain of Brown’s abecedary. As a stand-alone poem about the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, “Terriculament” is fine. Still not Brown’s strongest work, it has some lovely moments and asks important questions (although I would suggest that the “disaster movie” comparison, while accurate, has perhaps outlived its usefulness). As part of Abecedarium, however, the poem does not work. The other poems in the collection are very personal (or at least they appear to be). They are intimate in a way that “Terriculament” fails to achieve. The focus of the poem does narrow, moving from the world watching images of the attacks on television down to the image of a collective “us” unable to sleep, worrying not about “the state of affairs” which “cannot keep / us as awake and alert as the state / of our souls, our unclean // consciences” can. Yet the reader (part of the “us,” one assumes) never feels connected to this poem the way she does to the others in the collection.
That said, this is only one small misstep in an engaging and thoughtful collection. Anyone who loves words, who loves language, who loves the interplay of poetry and life as it is lived, will enjoy Abecedarium.
- Wendy Galgan, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and Editor of Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters.
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[20 September 2011. by Kathryn Buckley]
Janice Eidus, The Last Jewish Virgin: A Novel of Fate. Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2010. $24.95, paper. ISBN-13 978-159709-393-4
Janice Eidus’s novel The Last Jewish Virgin: A Novel of Fate brings the use of vampires in literature to a level Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series could never quite reach. Void of vampires, Meyers’s novels would fall flat, whereas Eidus’s penetrating descriptions and plot remain intensely gripping, the vampire aspect merely altering the line between realism and fantasy. Lilith Zeremba, an art student at Bennett Institute of Art and Design is similar to today’s fashionistas and hipsters in that she is interested in becoming an educated woman yet is still hyperaware of trends as well as the opposite sex, regardless of all efforts to delay that area of her life. Her virginity is highlighted in the title and on page one of the novel, but it’s really in Chapter Two that we gain insight into her character’s strength upon learning about the first of many instances in which she is at odds with her mother. “To my Jewish feminist mother’s great chagrin I intended to become a fashion designer and join their glamorous ranks even though she’d brought me up not to idealize wealth and privilege.”
Set in New York City, the perfect backdrop for a woman of Lilith’s individuality and pursuits, she encounters the man who becomes the driving force of the novel: Mr. Rock, her drawing teacher and a potential vampire, who dangles others from strings like an experienced puppeteer – Lilith herself, both her compliant and cruel classmates, and even those intimately present in her life, her own mother and potential lover, Colin Abel. Mr. Rock, Baron, as we later learn him to be, initially mirrors all attractive professors who attempt to bed their students “bearing his middle years like a sexy, ageless musician” and “he continued to smile at me, his teeth shimmering in the light”; but deftly shown by Eidus is that there is more to the man who challenges Lilith’s initial feistiness and inhabits her world deeply. Quickly suppressed are her desires to stand out, “the colorful harem pants and high collared Mandarin blouse I’d worn in order to distance myself as much as possible from the vampire motif that had so intrigued him the week before,” an act of rebellion that does not deter her from adhering to Mr. Rock’s orders both inside and out of the classroom.
Lilith is never quite able to blend in – a model, love interest, jealousy victim, and daughter appalled by her mother’s change of principles. Beneath his sunglasses and biting tongue, Mr. Rock keeps her and those in his realm on their toes using his manipulations and clout to obtain what he wants from his prey. When he speaks to his students, his voice is described as “icy” and he tells them, “All of your drawings about death were unimaginative. You’re all stifled and out of touch with your deepest drives and hungers.” Or to Lilith herself during an initial request, “You keep the thing you hide within yourself under lock and key.” It is his role in the entire novel, the provocateur, and while I don’t know that I agree with Eidus’s choice to use vampires as a vehicle given the overall merit in the text, Lilith’s richly-layered character, and the spare but characterizing New York City descriptions, I do think she succeeds in developing characters who best represent human capacity for growth, grandiose life plans, and values gone awry due to impulse. And not to say Eidus doesn’t bring Lilith home, a journey I might add, worth taking within the novel’s 147 pages. “Of course, this had been my destination all along. In the rain the building looked dark and cursed. The padlocked gate was wide open, welcoming me.” The novel ultimately seems a testament to where one thinks she is going versus where she actually does go.
- Kathryn Buckley is an Adjunct English Instructor and a graduate of
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