Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

Daisy Johnson’s control of language keeps the reader utterly engaged in her new novel, Sisters, from the story’s opening words—a list in which each item begins with “My sister is” and ranges from “a black hole” to “a forest on fire”—all the way to the final searing sentences.

July and her older sister, September, have moved with their mother to the coast of England and into the old, deteriorating home where both September and her father were born. In this house, we see the ways that setting shapes everything that can, or might, unfold. We see where boundaries are and where they all but disappear.

The concept of boundaries is at the center of July and September’s relationship. So much of their interaction is predicated on September’s control. Interesting, too, is the mother’s voice and perspective in this story: when we hear from her and when we don’t; what she knows and what is hidden from her view.

As the novel unfolds, Johnson brings readers more fully into the complexities and contradictions of the sisters’ relationship. Where does one girl stop and the other begin? How does biology bind us? How do our actions impact someone else’s life? And how does a person find their own voice? The novel raises many questions, and even as it poses some answers through July and September’s story, many other curiosities—delightfully—remain.

Sisters casts a spell, and Johnson’s ability to make her language twist and turn, to hint and suggest at something much larger, is truly remarkable.

Sisters casts a spell, and Daisy Johnson’s ability to make her language twist and turn, to hint and suggest at something much larger, is truly remarkable.

Family Drama, Fiction

Fiction Family Drama

Hieroglyphics

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

It isn’t a mystery, yet in many ways, Jill McCorkle’s Hieroglyphics builds like one as characters appear, slowly reveal more of their pasts and secrets and eventually expose their connections and how the story fits together. Overlapping memories—of the things one tries to bury or make sense of—create layers of meaning for the characters and their children, whose voices compose the story with a range of experiences and perspectives. The prose is magnetic, drawing you in and holding your attention as questions slowly turn into answers.

Place functions as a link across time and between seemingly disparate lives as retirees Lil and Frank return to the site of their earlier lives in North Carolina. The early deaths of parents haunt them both. Lil dives deep into her memories, exploring moments that, perhaps, might best have been left alone. Frank keeps visiting their former home, and his presence impacts Shelley, who now lives there, in unimaginable ways as she cares for her sons and goes to work as a court stenographer each day. Shelley’s life is full of her own secrets and the stories she tells herself to make sense of them.

Each of these adults—Shelley, Frank and Lil—focuses much of their energy on making an effort to communicate with and care for their children. As the parental figures struggle with their histories, choices and actions, it is through the lens of the children that these secrets find power and meaning. This echo, this sense of connectedness, of how we care for and hurt each other, gives the novel a clear resonance.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jill McCorkle shares how one of her father’s memories became her own.

It isn’t a mystery, yet in many ways, Jill McCorkle’s Hieroglyphics builds like one as characters appear, slowly reveal more of their pasts and secrets, and eventually expose their connections and how the story fits together.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Crossings

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

Alex Landragin’s Crossings weaves a remarkable tale across centuries, landscapes and human lives. A bookbinder receives a manuscript from a baroness with explicit direction to not read what it holds. When the baroness dies soon after, the bookbinder discovers that the manuscript contains three tales—a ghost story written by Charles Baudelaire for an illiterate girl, a dark love story of a Jewish German exile who is unable to leave Paris at the edge of the Nazi invasion, and the tale of a woman who lives through seven generations.

Each story is rich with characters, ideas and keenly imagined moments. The points of connection, however, are what make the text compelling and open to so much discovery. As the preface ends, readers learn that the book can be read in two modes: one narrative at a time, or through the “Baroness” guided sequence that hops between the three stories. In this method, the stories weave through time and space to create a fourth text, one in which nuances and subtext emerge through unexpected connections. As characters, objects and phrases appear and reappear, time blends, and the questions of what makes us who we are, how our choices impact our futures and how other people perceive us become central to the telling.

The prose is engaging, asking you to keep up as the story jumps from ending to beginning, tangling time and stretching the edge of what a narrative can do. There’s a tension between wanting to read quickly, to let yourself be absorbed in this fantastical and real world, or slowing down to allow each story to breathe. The beauty here is the multiplicity of the reading experiences, of the chance to do both, as each iteration of the novel asks different questions and demands a different mode of attention from the reader.

Alex Landragin’s Crossings weaves a remarkable tale across centuries, landscapes and human lives.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Scorpionfish

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

In Natalie Bakopoulos’ richly told Scorpionfish, readers step into contemporary Athens with Mira, a Greek American woman who has returned to the city while she grieves her parents’ deaths as well as a dissolving relationship. As we enter the mess of her universe, counterpoints appear from her neighbor, the Captain. The alternating voices of these broken, fragmented people explore how each tries to repair and save the self, and how their personal connections become integral to that process.

As Mira and the Captain get to know each other—sitting together and apart, talking across their balcony walls—the conversation reveals their layers and the ways that each sees the other. The newness of their connection allows them to puzzle through the complexities of their past loves, friendships and familial bonds. Each is navigating the ending of a relationship; each is reevaluating priorities. As we witness this growing friendship, the specificity of place—of the sea, the city and the interior emotional realm—cradles the characters’ attempts to understand what it means to be human and to love.

Bakopoulos’ prose is descriptive, full of images and details, and yet some sentences are so clear and axiomatic that the reader may need to pause and think, recognizing truths they’ve always known. In a certain way, reading Scorpionfish is a rereading, a remarkable recognition of how language can work, how grief and love and loss can be so particular, so meaningful, so universal—and how words can make those resonances propulsive and haunting.

Family Saga, Fiction

Fiction Family Saga

The Mountains Sing

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing recounts a fascinating narrative of Vietnam through the alternating voices of Hương—a woman born in Vietnam in 1960—and her grandmother, Diệu Lan. Quế Mai is an acclaimed Vietnamese poet, and her vivid images, along with the simplicity of her prose, make the novel propulsive and haunting in its depiction of a deep, nuanced landscape.

Early on, Quế Mai writes, “Only through honesty can we learn about the truth.” That truth is, at times, hard to confront. The Vietnam War-set opening scene—as Hương and her grandmother seek shelter from bombs, only to find that the available hiding places are full of people or cold water or both—is difficult to process, but the novel begs us to keep reading, to see how the two women’s narratives converge, to understand the legacy and complexity of family and place.

In alternating chapters, Quế Mai moves between Hương’s visit to Hanoi in 2012, her survival of the Vietnam War with her late grandmother and Diệu Lan’s harrowing stories of how war, poverty and North Vietnam’s land reform movement ripped their family apart. Diệu Lan’s community turns on her as a result of the politics of the land reform movement, and she is chased off her land, forced to abandon her family and remake her entire life. These historical chapters reveal the complexities of this family and how it has been ruptured by generations of conflict, bolstering our comprehension of how colonialism, violence and the landscape impact a family’s past and present.

While many recent novels from authors like Ocean Vuong and Viet Thanh Nguyen give glimpses of the Vietnamese American experience, The Mountains Sing offers a tale of Vietnamese history through a Vietnamese lens: neighbors caring for and turning against each other, families split apart by war and attempts at reunification on various scales. We also see the ways that food (foraging for it, cooking it, sharing it, eating it) can bring communities together and rip them apart.

Above all, we see how war impacts the individual. Hương and Diệu Lan are remarkably drawn characters. They’re complex, likable, flawed women, and each is searching to connect with family and understand her community and history. Their pain and joy make the novel and landscape sing.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing weaves a fascinating narrative of Vietnam through the alternating voices of Huong—a woman born in Vietnam in 1960—and her grandmother, Dieu Lan. Quế Mai is an acclaimed Vietnamese poet, and her vivid images, along with the simplicity of her prose, make the novel propulsive and haunting in its depiction of a deep, nuanced landscape.