Fiction

Guest Post by Manasi Patil

Marybeth, Hollister and Jane is a fictional story set in the rural area of  Callicoon, New York.  The book has a very realistic vibe to it and all the characters seem believable. It follows the journey of a handful of people trying to locate the Eagle Diamond, stolen in the 1960’s. At the start, most of them are from the same organization, LVAJ, whose job is to locate stolen arts, artifacts, etc. and then pass them to someone else. But as the story unfolds, the head of the organization, Peter Reece, is too weak to manage the organization, and eventually all the members separate and begin the search on their own.

All through the journey of reading this book, I was on a rollercoaster. The scenes are sketched out in a way that makes the words leap off the page. All the characters too, are perfect for their roles. Author Vera Jane Cook has done an exceptional job. I particularly like Brock Stanley with his wise, witty, and caring nature (for Jane).The unexpected twist of The Sisters and Jane was my favorite scene from this novel.

The ending could have been much better, though. It winded up too simple and easy and I felt that the story had promised a different sort of end. Nonetheless, Marybeth, Hollister and Jane is a great read, and I will certainly be reading more from this author.

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Marybeth, Hollister and Jane by Vera Jane Cook. Chatter Creek Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Manasi Patil is a young author with a passion for writing.

Guest Post by Amy Ballard

Which is more important, the clan or the individual? In Jean Auel’s 500-page series opener, Cro-Magnon Ayla navigates the customs of her adoptive Neanderthal people while pondering what it means that she is “Other.” To assimilate, she must comply with clan rules with which she disagrees. Sometimes she chooses defiance. When her practice of hunting with a sling (a man’s privilege) is discovered, she is placed under a death curse. Ayla isolates in a secret cave, an apt metaphor for the forced solitudes of today’s coronavirus pandemic. As clan political dynamics shift, she must determine whether she can live under the rule of a leader who, despite her valued status as a medicine woman, systematically abuses her.

Since its publication in 1980, the novel and its five sequels in the Earth’s Children series have generated a body of criticism, favorable and unfavorable, around its historicity, feminism, and treatment of race, among other topics. For the quarantined in 2020, though, The Clan of the Cave Bear does what it emphatically must: transport the reader to another world.

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The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. Penguin Random House, June 2002.

Reviewer bio: Amy Ballard writes and teaches in southern Idaho. Her fiction has appeared in Barely South Review and elsewhere. Find Amy at www.amyballard.com.

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Guest Post by Jacqueline Williams

Given to me as a birthday gift, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a manifesto on shared solitude and the different ways in which we try to overcome grief. One of the intriguing things about the book is the author’s choice to leave the narrator unnamed along with most of the characters. However, at no point does that choice prove as an obstacle to the reading experience; instead, it renders visible particular details about the personality of the characters thereby allowing the reader to connect more deeply with them.

The book is a fairly easy read about the narrator’s journey of simultaneously losing and gaining someone and the idea of collective grief. As literary fiction, the book is peppered with trivia on various literary writers such as Adrienne Rich, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka among many others. The characters too draw from the similar flavor of what it means to be a writer and the conflicts attached to the profession of writing.

My favorite part of the book is the bond shared between the narrator and Apollo the Great Dane. Nunez’s take on the human-dog relationship is unlike any other. She is spot-on in her representation of the contemporary nature of company that of being alone, together. She writes, “What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and greet each other?”

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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books, February 2019.

Reviewer bio: My name is Jacqueline Williams and I’m currently pursuing M.A in English. My field of interests includes Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Medical Humanities.

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