Review by Booklist Review
Hodson's reflective essays paint a picture of her desires, insecurities, and hopes. Exploring her relationships as well as her myriad jobs including stints modeling and working for NASA, American Apparel, and a sugar daddy dating website she shows her simultaneous need for the world and her desire to reject it or even simply disappear. The best essays in the collection confront this struggle head on. In Pity the Animal, set during the summer that artist Marina Abramovic sat with MoMA visitors for any amount of time they chose, Hodson desperately wants to sit with the artist but can't bring herself to. I feared her gaze she made people feel like the only ones in the room. I wanted to feel fractional. Despite the nebulous self that emerges, Hodson's writing style betrays her in a way, offering a clear and strong point of view. Although less successful pieces can lose the narrative thread and read disjointedly, this is overall a unique collection about being an artist and a woman in a world that doesn't always value either.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this mixed debut collection, Hodson explores "the possibility of ruin, which is always present," in romance, art, and consumerism. Skillful description often takes the place of emotion in her writing, resulting in affectless exercises that reveal her fearless and sometime reckless curiosity, but don't analyze it. Hodson's best essays are those that are most narratively cohesive. "Pity the Animal" finds a relationship between bodily commodification and alienation by documenting Hodson's experience with fashion modeling and flirtation with working as an escort for a "sugar daddy" website that was "quite clearly, a loophole for prostitution." "I'm Only a Thousand Miles Away" observes obsession through her adolescent experience of being a boy-band fan and being the object of a stalker. "Small Crimes" details a platonic summer fling at age 13 with the cool girl at camp, a friendship that only existed because it had an "expiration date we both silently agreed to." These essays offer emotional heft and immersive storytelling. It's difficult to invest in other selections, though, particularly those about her relationships in later adolescence and in adulthood, since they tend to rely on opacity in place of specificity. Though even in the weakest entries Hodson produces some insight and humor, she is at her best working in more disciplined, narrative forms-an approach she embraces too rarely. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An eerie and uncanny collection of essays."I gathered secrets like little pieces of survival, and I was so healthy," writes Hodson early on in the first essay of her debut collection. From the very beginning, the author sets up the tone of the book, which feels crystalized in time and space, oscillating between intoxicating and alienating, exciting and dull, genuine and contrived. Much of this collection of essays feels more related to fiction than nonfiction. The author's word choices capture entire worlds and emotional landscapes, so much so that readers might wonder whether she is indulging in autofiction. However, this is not a disservice to the book, which is filled with enough tangible instances of lived experience to capture reader attention. She shares unusual tips for modeling, one of her previous jobs: "I narrowed it down to one trick, one simple, private action: think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the electricity between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence. Now, turn the camera into the face of the beloved and tell it everything." Hodson's language magnetizes and begs for attention without ever feeling overly needy. The author effectively meditates on the development of the self in a highly material world and on the function of female bodies in a society that systematically objectifies and commodifies them. "If I'm sold as an object," she writes, "then I'm no longer a threat. My mind spoken for, contained, no one waiting for proof, my body no longer my own." Such pointed observations pop up throughout the book, occasionally causing disorientation but successfully keeping readers longing for explanations, keeping the pages turning.A simultaneously bewildering and compelling body of work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
