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FictionPoetry

Root Fractures

Review by Freya Sachs

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second collection of poems, the speaker is haunted by echoes of the past that reverberate into the present, and by generational, individual and collective traumas. In deft and surprising ways, the forms of the poems interact with their content, both shaping and breaking it.

The poems center on the speaker’s interrogation of her memory, which is inherently tied to a pattern of displacement and disappearance in her family history, through her parents’ emigration from Vietnam, Vietnam’s reform movement (Dổi Mới) and her childhood in California. Root Fractures begins in Vietnamese, and, as a non-speaker or reader of the language, I found myself drawn in, curious to see what I would discover even in moments where I was not the intended audience. The poems are deeply affecting. There’s a balance between fragmentation—both at the level of individual lines and of whole poems—and accumulative moments where the fragments coalesce. Some poems are layered over photographs, some are cut and rearranged, recalling how the speaker’s brother cut himself out of family photographs before eventually taking his own life. The spaces left on the page provide pauses that make the words sing in new ways, while the repeated formal motifs create patterns for reading and meaning-making that mirror the speaker’s experience of a desire for wholeness and understanding that can’t be fully realized.

These are poems worth returning to; each reading brings discoveries of new pathways of tension and connection.

The poems of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Root Fractures center on the speaker's interrogation of her memory, which is inherently tied to a pattern of displacement and disappearance in her family history.
FictionPoetry

A Year of Last Things

Review by Michael Magras

Forgiveness, memory, loss and the vicissitudes of love are among the recurring themes of A Year of Last Things, Michael Ondaatje’s exceptional new collection of poetry. More than a decade has passed since Ondaatje, who shared the 1992 Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient, published a book of poems. The return is welcome, as he demonstrates yet again that he is a master of the genre.

Most of the poems that appear here are in free verse, with a few others written wholly or in part as prose poems. Each piece displays not only Ondaatje’s gift for the lyrical phrase but also his peripatetic nature, as the collection travels across various countries, most notably Italy, England and his native Sri Lanka. The book is divided into several sections, with the first centering on forgiveness and memory. It’s difficult to single out highlights when every poem is so accomplished, but particularly moving is “5 A.M.,” a tender piece on the restorative beauty of memories and the way they return unexpectedly, “like a gift / from forgetfulness, / as a desire can wake you.”

Later sections include ruminations on unfulfilled lives, such as “The Then,” in which Ondaatje writes of being struck by the urge “to erase this life, and desire what I might have known / in photographs of you before we met.” There is also a group of erudite love poems, including the witty “Leg Glance,” in which he employs a cricket metaphor referring to “not bothering to move / from the path of the dangerous ball,” to parallel one’s behavior in the midst of a love affair.

Set in museums and piazzas across several continents, with references to painters, novelists, playwrights, jazz musicians and even W.G. Sebald’s technique of incorporating photographs into the text, A Year of Last Things brilliantly explores its themes.

 

Set in museums and piazzas across several continents, Michael Ondaatje’s poetry collection A Year of Last Things brilliantly explores its themes, reminding us that he is a master of the genre.
FictionPoetry

Modern Poetry

Review by Thane Tierney

For a collection titled Modern Poetry, the latest offering from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss spends a fair amount of time communing with the past.

In the title poem, named after a textbook she studied in college, she reminisces about how she and her roommate referred to William Carlos Williams as “Billy C. Billygoat,” and how she managed to fake her way to an A on a paper about Wallace Stevens despite “having no clue / what he meant by ‘The deer and the dachshund are one.’” That fake-it-till-you-make-it approach has apparently served her well, because she has not only become a highly regarded poet, but also gone on to a two-decade-plus career teaching poetry to other young people with impostor syndrome.

While the spirit of the avowedly modern ‘60s poet Frank O’Hara hovered over her last collection, 2021’s frank: sonnets, which won her the Pulitzer, her guiding star for this outing is a poet who is decidedly not modern: John Keats. In fact, the final poem of the volume, “Romantic Poet,” is at once an homage to Keats and a comment on the contemporary tension between loving an artist’s work and having mixed feelings—or outright disdain—for the artist. After being told the many reasons she would not have liked the unnamed “him” at the poem’s outset, she rejoins with a simple “But the nightingale, I said.”

Ah, the nightingale, the bird that sings. Seuss’ song is not the A-B-A-B rhyme scheme that was pounded into our middle school heads. It’s more subtle, and evinces itself when read out loud. “Rhyme,” Seuss said at 2023’s Great Lakes Poetry Festival, “can just do a thing that nothing else can do; it appeals to our bodies, not our minds.”

In “Romantic Poetry,” Seuss writes, “I was twenty three when I sold off / Modern Poetry and sailed to Italy, seeking / Romantic poetry . . . and found my way to Rome, / and Keats’s death room. / His deathbed, a facsimile.” Feel it, in your body, as you read it? Twenty three, Italy, poetry, facsimile. It’s all there for the taking. To co-opt the famed slogan from the unsung McCann-Erickson ad agency poet who created it for milk, “Modern Poetry: it does a body good.”

In Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss reminisces on faking it through poetry classes in college and on the complicated legacy of John Keats.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

The Morningside

Review by Michael Magras

Téa Obreht’s satisfyingly unsettling new novel, The Morningside, takes place in the near future, in an East Coast city that resembles New York. Eleven-year-old Silvia and her mother have traveled to Island City after their home was destroyed by flooding. They move into a 100-year-old building called the Morningside, that, like Island City, has seen better days. Silvia and other refuge-seekers have been brought in by the federal Repopulation Program to help revitalize the place.

The building superintendent is Silvia’s Aunt Ena, a woman who is “short, loud, and incredibly ill-practiced at speaking to eleven-year-old nieces.” A marvelous character, Ena has an unfortunate tendency to share details about the farm the family once lived on, details that Silvia’s mother would prefer to keep secret. She also fills Silvia in on Bezi Duras, the mysterious resident of the 33rd floor penthouse. Silvia begins to suspect that Bezi is not just an eccentric painter with an elaborate orchard but also a Vila, a vindictive mountain spirit. Her suspicions grow when light bulbs spontaneously burst and water pipes begin “spurting sulfurously” after a curious Silvia tries to break into Bezi’s apartment.

That’s just the start of the strange dealings. With finely calibrated assurance, Obreht develops a sense of unease that is compounded by an underground radio transmission known as the Drowned City Dispatch, large animals rumored to be “men during the day and dogs at night,” a friend who lures Silvia into nighttime escapades, and the possibility that a killer may be in their midst.

The ending is too neat, but The Morningside soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own. Whether or not they ever face forcible displacement in their life, everyone at some point must confront their past. Obreht addresses this truism with startling freshness in this entertaining work.

Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.
FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Table for Two

Review by Eric A. Ponce

You can learn a lot about someone by getting dinner with them. At a small table, in the glow of candlelight, you might find yourself connecting with a new acquaintance as if they were an old friend. In Table for Two, the new collection of stories from beloved novelist Amor Towles, that level of intimacy is reached and at times exceeded. Towles presents his protagonists with such a high degree of detail that readers will feel like they know the characters personally. While this is the hallmark of any good fiction, Towles elevates these stories further by setting them in complex political landscapes and amid moral quagmires. The result is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.

One choice that distinguishes this collection is its geographical organization. Towles begins with six stories that take place in New York City. The first of these, “The Line,” actually opens in rural Russia, where our “hero,” Pushkin, lives an idyllic life. However, after the Bolshevik revolution, his wife, Irina, insists that they move to Moscow. From there, through many winding twists of fate, the couple ends up in New York City, far away from their feudal beginnings and their Communist awakenings. The five following stories take place in the New York of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, displaying the city at its wealthiest through characters trying to take some of that wealth for themselves. The second half of the book is a novella set in early 20th century Los Angeles, capturing a unique time in the city’s history when financial success coupled with an increasingly seedy underground laid the foundation for LA to become one of the largest, most diverse cities in the United States.

The most engaging, artful part of Table for Two, however, is the unique ability Towles has to approach his characters simultaneously through authorial intervention and through getting inside their heads. Frequently, Towles writes about the characters as though he and they know what is going to happen, or as though they know what the moral of their story is. Rather than spoiling the plot or coming off as heavy-handed, this technique allows readers to fully engage in the stories, pushing them to consider for themselves: What does success mean? What lengths would you go to for money? What does it mean to be happy with your life? Towles forces the reader and his characters to address these questions, and the answers you find in this book will move you.

Amor Towles’ latest, Table for Two, is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Glorious Exploits

Review by Thane Tierney

At its heart, Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is something of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let’s-put-on-a-show romp . . . with a few minor, and mind-bending, exceptions. The stars are a pair of foul-mouthed unemployed potters from Syracuse, Sicily, the year is 412 BC and the acting troupe isn’t a bunch of neighborhood kids; it’s composed of Athenian prisoners of war left in a quarry to starve.

The tale’s narrator, Lampo, is a garrulous scoundrel always on the lookout for spare coin. One day, after tossing scraps of food to the Athenian prisoners in exchange for their reciting passages from Euripides, Lampo’s more taciturn friend Gelon presents him with a plan: reinvent themselves as directors, recruit the prisoners as a cast, tart up the prison quarry as their amphitheater and present two of Euripides’ plays, Medea and Trojan Women, back to back.

What could possibly go wrong? Apart, of course, from the fact that the potential audience of Syracusans hates the defeated Athenians, and that the production is to be mounted by two unemployed potters with no background in theater. Nonetheless, the show must go on; the hapless duo happens upon a mysterious benefactor who offers funds for the production, sets are built, costumes are sewn and various potentially hazardous wheels are set in motion.

At the outset of rehearsals, co-director Gelon gives his captive cast a little pep talk. He reminisces about how the Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex sparked his fondness for the theater: “I don’t hate you. How could I? Even though I know you came to make us slaves. I can’t hate you. I believe any city that gave us those plays has something worth saving.”

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then Glorious Exploits reveals that art makes even stranger ones, as the captors and the captives pause their hostilities for the sake of a greater—if imperfect—good. Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in this quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.

Ferdia Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in his debut novel, Glorious Exploits, a quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

The Limits

Review by Freya Sachs

Pia’s divorced parents live disparate lives: Her mother is a marine biologist, diving to explore coastal reefs and track the impact of humans on the oceans of French Polynesia; her father is a New York City doctor with a large apartment in Manhattan, caring for patients in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has just gotten remarried to Kate, a teacher who finds herself confounded by remote teaching. When Pia returns to live with her father in Manhattan, she has a new relationship to build with Kate, even while she carries a secret with her from her time in Tahiti with her mother.

At each turn, the characters in Nell Freudenberger’s The Limits discover themselves to be connected more complexly than they knew. From New York City to a Zoom screen, from a hospital full of early COVID-19 cases to an island off the coast of Tahiti, Freudenberger brings the anxieties and challenges of the early pandemic days to vivid, engaging life.

The characters have full and fascinating inner lives, and real concerns—parenthood, a spreading virus, preserving the natural world—that layer with their interpersonal conflicts. Each chapter shifts our focus, holding our attention on one place and perspective before turning to reveal relationships from a new angle. The novel addresses race, class, education and access without coming off as heavy-handed; it feels reflective of how circumstance determines our real-world choices.

One of the unique strengths of Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science—as she did with physics in 2019’s Lost and Wanted—in engaging, relevant ways. In The Limits, Freudenberger deftly employs the questions posed by climate change, seafloor mining and the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown to shape the story.

One of the unique strengths of Nell Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science in engaging, relevant ways, from the questions posed by climate change to seafloor mining to the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Wild Houses

Review by Arlene McKanic

In this reviewer’s (possibly prejudiced) view, there are few things as satisfying as a good work of Irish literature. The form doesn’t matter too much; a poem, a short story, a play, even a novel that makes no sense—looking at you, Finnegan’s Wake. A genius Irish writer can, in the words of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, make the English language “as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.” Such is the case with Colin Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses.

The setup is straightforward: Dev Hendrick lives alone in County Mayo with his late mother’s yappy little dog, Georgie. One rainy Friday night, Dev’s cousins, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, drag a teenager to Dev’s home and expect Dev to hide him. The teenager, Donal “Doll” English, is the brother of Cillian, a petty drug dealer who owes the Ferdias—or their drug lord boss—money. Cillian will get Doll back if he coughs up the cash by Monday.

Certainly, the situation ratchets up the reader’s anxiety, to say nothing of that of Doll’s mother, Sheila, and his sensible girlfriend, Nicky. These are the folks who take it upon themselves to find a lot of money in not a lot of time. Ironically, Cillian did once have what he owes, but it was washed away by a turlough, a temporary lake that, according to him, only happens in West Ireland.

But if you come for the nail-biting plot, you’ll stay for Barrett’s gorgeous language. Consider such phrases as this description of a TV: “its screen patinaed in a fuzz of glinting dust.” The sagging nets of a derelict tennis court are “as frayed as used dental floss.” Gabe Ferdia has “a face on him like a vandalised church.” And so on. Barrett, author of the short story collections Young Skins and Homesickness, treats the sketchiest of his characters with tenderness and compassion. Wild Houses is a stunning work.

Come to Wild Houses for the nail-biting plot; stay for Colin Barrett’s gorgeous language: Here, tennis court nets are “as frayed as used dental floss” and a man has “a face on him like a vandalised church.”
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian FictionComing of Age

Memory Piece

Review by Laura Sackton

In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores memory, art, technology and consumption through the eyes of three childhood best friends. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese school in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. Though they come from different backgrounds and have divergent interests, they’re drawn together by a shared desire to make something more—or different—of their lives. Moving from the dot-com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways the three women’s lives converge and diverge.

Giselle turns to art, launching her career with an experimental performance piece in which she lives for a year in a hidden room in a mall. As she becomes more immersed in the art world, she begins to question her motives and desires, floundering through a life that is sometimes more display than substance. Jackie gets caught up in the early days of the internet, working for a tech startup by day and developing her own radical projects by night. Ellen becomes an activist in college, and devotes her life to community organizing and fighting against the gentrification threatening her home. 

The novel’s three distinct sections drive home just how differently Giselle, Jackie and Ellen engage with and react to the world—and each other—as everything changes around them. Jackie’s section is full of frenetic energy, while Giselle’s is dreamy and quiet: Her voice comes through at a remove, as if she’s narrating from a distance. Ellen’s section is poignant with loss and nostalgia. Throughout, Ko’s prose is beautiful and sharp, and her ability to shapeshift through a range of tones makes the novel a pleasure to read.

A bittersweet wistfulness permeates the whole of Memory Piece. Though Giselle, Jackie and Ellen remain important to one another throughout their lives, there is a separateness to each of the novel’s sections that gives it a meandering and melancholy feel. This is a compelling, often chilling and beautifully observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, each other.

Moving from the dot com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways three women’s lives converge and diverge.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Fervor

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is a daring hybrid quality to Toby Lloyd’s Fervor, a sense of branching interests that might doom another, less focused book. In his debut novel, Lloyd explores a wide array of emotional and philosophical topics, from the influence of God to the duties of a memoirist to the characteristic wrinkles of family dysfunction. In the process, he also merges a family saga with a coming-of-age story, a metaphysical exploration and even an outright horror novel. It’s a lot to pack into less than 300 pages, but Lloyd pulls it off, announcing himself as an exciting voice to watch. 

Fervor follows the Rosenthal family, a devout Jewish household rocked by the loss of their patriarch, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor who’s recently divulged his life story to his daughter-in-law Hannah, the family’s resident writer. Every member of the family—from Yosef’s son, Eric, to his grandsons, Gideon and Tovyah—has their own feelings about Hannah’s project, but in the end it’s Yosef’s granddaughter, Elsie, who is impacted the most. After her grandfather dies, Elsie starts to act out, visibly suffering in ways that frustrate her teachers and her parents. When Elsie suddenly disappears one day, then reappears in a disheveled, dazed state, Hannah suspects that something supernatural has entered her daughter, upsetting the family’s balance of power and threatening their sanity.

Lloyd frames the story of Elsie’s unraveling in several ways, ranging from third-person storytelling that looms over the entire family, to Hannah’s written account, to sections from the point of view of Tovyah’s college friend, who witnesses the Rosenthals’ strangeness firsthand. In spreading the story out across these perspectives, and even across years of family history, Lloyd invites readers to ask whose version of the narrative is actually the truth. Hannah’s presence as the family’s self-appointed chronicler adds to the dramatic tension, propelling events forward with her ferocious longing for secret knowledge that heightens the stakes of the book’s questions of faith and reason.

But even beyond the structural cleverness and the way it plays with perspective, Fervor succeeds on the strength of Lloyd’s elegant, confident language. The book is driven by a constant push-pull between the sacred and secular, and Lloyd’s prose reflects that with sentences that feel like they could simultaneously conjure up a spirit and captivate a very human audience. His voice is practiced, smart and spellbinding, making Fervor a book that fans of family dramas and horror stories alike will happily devour.

Toby Lloyd’s voice is practiced, smart and spellbinding, making Fervor a book that fans of family dramas and horror stories alike will happily devour.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Review by Carole V. Bell

Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a powerful and lyrical allegory about an older artist haunted by her own creativity.

Alma Cruz is a writer and professor based in Vermont and one of four daughters in a family from the Dominican Republic. Having witnessed a friend and fellow author driven to a mental institution and then to an early death by writerly frustration, Alma is guilt-ridden for resisting her friend’s pleas for help with her unfinished story, and, more than that, determined to avoid the same fate. In the aftermath of her father’s subsequent death, two things become clear. First, Alma herself will “soon be entering that territory of the old—okay, not old old, but the anteroom, no matter what the magazines said about seventy being the new fifty.” And second, aging isn’t just a matter of physical or cognitive decline; “aging also happens in the creative life.” And “there weren’t enough years left to tell all the stories she wanted to tell.”

Seeking change and control, Alma quits her day job. But it’s not enough. The feeling of artistic aging, that she’s running out of time, won’t allow her any peace. The solution, Alma realizes, is to set herself free by exorcising the ghosts of her unfinished projects. Returning to the D.R., she decides to bury her failed manuscripts in the soil of her homeland, but rather than squashing them permanently, the rite gives her characters new life. The stories Alma buries grow like seeds. The remainder of the novel is focused on these tales.

Alvarez has a wonderful way of being both lyrical and precisely concrete at the same time. The specificity of her writing is reflected in myriad ways on every page, and it’s not limited to the beauty of The Cemetery of Untold Stories’ central metaphor about storytelling. Two characters stand out: Papi, Alma’s father, a doctor turned dissident who hated talking about the past, and Bienvenida, a fictionalized version of the wife of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the D.R. for 31 years. They have exile in common: “Bienvenida had been erased from history; Papi had sealed himself off . . . these were precisely the characters Alma felt drawn to. The silenced ones, their tongues cut off.” That brutal image is one indelible description among many. Magical and multifaceted, this meditation on creativity, culture and aging is a triumph.

Read our interview with Julia Alvarez on The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Magical and multifaceted, Julia Alvarez’s meditation on creativity, culture and aging, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is a triumph.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

James

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Percival Everett brings The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved supporting character, Jim, into the foreground of his new novel, James, a reworking of the Mark Twain classic. Though James stays with Huck Finn’s characters, setting and first-person perspective, it’s Jim, not Huck, who narrates this story. Jim overhears that he’s about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, and, as in the original, he runs, landing on Jackson Island, where he encounters Huck, who’s faked his own death to flee his abusive, alcoholic father. The two set out together, floating down the Mississippi.

James, like Huck Finn, is a picaresque tale, one of improbable adventures and moments of reunion. Jim and Huck encounter the con men the Duke and Dauphin, and though this duo get their comic moments, Everett highlights their quick turn to brutality. Jim and Huck are soon separated, and Jim recounts a series of horrors—Everett pulls no punches in depicting white enslavers’ treatment of enslaved people—leavened with the unexpected connections Jim makes. Unlike in Huck Finn, James’ Jim can read and write, secretly reading books from his enslaver’s library. In a feverish dream encounter after he’s bitten by a snake, Jim debates Voltaire, proponent of liberty and equality, forcing Voltaire to admit to his own racism. All the while, he longs for his wife and daughter, determined to gain his own freedom and theirs.

Everett balances a moral clarity about the atrocities of slavery with a dry, Twainian humor, even turning Twain’s dialect on its head to great effect: In this telling, enslaved people use this stereotypical “slave” dialect only around white people, so as to seem unthreateningly foolish, while laughing about it together in private. On his journey, Jim repeatedly encounters other enslaved people being brutalized by white people, but he’s powerless to intervene; life has taught him that to do so leads to greater violence, and sometimes death. Throughout, the novel’s revelations feel both surprising and convincing, and its explosive, cathartic ending points at the possibility of hope for Jim and his family.

In an era of retellings, James stands out for staying true to Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people. In revealing Jim’s full humanity, deep thinking and love through his hero’s journey, Everett has written a visionary and necessary reimagining.

In an era of retellings, Percival Everett’s James stands out for staying true to Mark Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Village Weavers

Review by Melissa Brown

Sisi and Gertie meet as children in the 1940s. They come from different strata of their Haitian society, where skin color, hairstyle and city of birth can all mark a person’s worth, depending on who is judging. These two fast friends are often confused but not truly bothered by these distinctions until Gertie’s meddling sisters conspire to separate them. Ignorant of significant truths about their families, Sisi and Gertie don’t realize how intertwined they really are. Then their budding connection is suddenly severed, and misunderstandings and mistrust lead to alienation that lasts for decades until life finally draws them back to each other.

Told from both girls’ perspectives, Myriam J.A. Chancy’s Village Weavers homes in on the intricate, nuanced lives of women—as sisters, friends, lovers and mothers. With interjections in French, Spanish and Kreyol throughout, the novel also covers historical ground, incorporating some of the spirituality, art, activism and politics of an island that has been divided between Haitians and Dominicans for centuries. The losses they endure eventually drive Gertie and Sisi away, like migrating birds, from their land and their memories. Against the backdrop of these weighty issues, Village Weavers unfolds somewhat slowly at first but finds a rhythm halfway through, where the pace picks up.

Chancy takes the reader from the 1940s and the World Expo marking Port-au-Prince’s bicentennial through the 1970s, when both women are living in America, and ultimately to 2002, when Sisi and Gertie have both grown old. “Not all sweetness is sweet at first,” and these two women must be willing to “dive into the depths” of what they do not understand to finally heal. Village Weavers is full of vibrancy, wistfulness and even playfulness, capably portraying the enduring tenacity of women in uncertain times. Reading Chancy’s portrayal of Haiti is a memorable experience—rich with contradictions and complexities, visceral and ever-changing.

Village Weavers is full of vibrancy, wistfulness and even playfulness, capably portraying the enduring tenacity of women in uncertain times.

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