Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this daring novel, Yuknavitch (The Chronology of Water) takes a provocative look at the intimate relationship among love, art, and sex in a group of emotionally scarred artists who want to save one of their own. Written in the voices of characters without first names-photographer, writer, poet, performance artist, playwright, filmmaker, and painter-the novel begins in modern Eastern Europe (likely Lithuania), occupied by an unseen force, where a photojournalist captures an award-winning shot: a young girl running from her exploding home, in which the rest of her family dies. The girl escapes into the woods, making her way to a widow's home; the widow teaches her about art, and the girl begins to paint. Meanwhile, an American writer who is friends with the photographer, is hospitalized with severe depression. The writer's best friend, a poet, believes she can help the writer; she enters the war zone to bring the orphaned girl to the United States. Yuknavitch's novel is disturbing and challenging, but undoubtedly leaves its mark. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Gorgeous, scary, and a breathtaking rush to read, this book is less a meditation than a provocation on the power and dangers of art. It opens in eastern Europe with a news photographer taking a picture of a girl rushing from a house exploding behind her, killing her family. The photograph wins a prize, leaving its creator in turmoil, but it has momentous meaning for the writer, a friend of the photographer mourning a stillborn daughter. (Characters are referenced by their occupations only, which instead of seeming pretentious or depersonalizing effectively strips them to their essence.) When the writer ends up hospitalized, she's attended by her performance artist friend, her playwright brother (who scripts some of the scenes), and her filmmaker husband, so distraught he punches out his wife's ex-husband, a baldly self-serving painter. When the poet shows up, fresh from graphically depicted scenes at lesbian sex clubs in Europe, she insists that the writer can be saved only by bringing the girl in the photograph to America. VERDICT Showing us how people use one another in an irredeemably violent world where the creation of art is morally neutral but finally the whole point, Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase) has written a sensational book. [See Prepub Alert, 1/5/15.]-Barbara Hoffert, -Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A grieving mother becomes obsessed with a famous photograph of a child fleeing a war zone. Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase, 2012, etc.) made an impression with her transgressive memoir The Chronology of Water, and her new novel features similar plot points and themes. The primary narrator (all except one of the characters are unnamed) is a bisexual writer, a recovering heroin addict, a wife, the mother of a dead daughter and a "strange and alive boy." She has become fixated on the subject of a photograph from an Eastern European conflict that portrays a young girl running away from the explosion that destroyed her home and killed her family. In recounting her life and art, the writer loosely describes a group of friends and family that includes her brother, the playwright; her husband, the filmmaker; her former lover the combat photojournalist; a deeply damaged performance artist; and her best friend, a fiercely ambisexual poet. None of these characters is particularly interesting, and they merely serve as players in the writer's ruminations on art and the violent, sexually charged sections that follow. When the writer collapses and is hospitalized, presumably from the weight of her grief, the poet becomes convinced they need to travel overseas to find the girl in the photo and bring her to safety. The narrative largely collapses into literary experimentalism at this point, with chapters posed as screenplays, fragmented imagery, poetry, minimalism, and white space substituted for storytelling. This isn't necessarily a negativeYuknavitch is a gifted writer whose dizzying passages are often as compelling as they are grotesque. But it's not a pretty story, and the novel's affected musings on the nature of art, gratuitous sexual excesses, and casual violence may overpower the grace of its words for some readers. Patricia Highsmith by way of Kathy Acker in a highbrow thriller that says as much about its writer as its story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
