Hold Tight, Don't Let Go by Laura Rose Wagner (review by Andrew R. '17)

Hold Tight, Don't Let Go: A Novel of Haiti by Laura Rose Wagner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go begins with a strangely subdued account of the catastrophic earthquake that killed more than 100,000 Haitians on January 12, 2010. Over the course of a few pages, the teenage narrator, Magdalie, witnesses the almost instantaneous leveling of the city of her childhood. But the reader can’t comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy until, months later, Magdalie forces herself to sit down and pour her memories onto the page, even as she admits that, “It doesn’t change anything if I write it down or not … It doesn’t change a thing.” Only here does the reader stop and say, Oh—she is upset, she is scarred, this is a tragedy. It hurts to read the passage: we feel Magdalie’s pain. The rest of the novel follows a similar trajectory. Intense emotion is the most important element of a story that deals with a disaster on this scale, and while that emotion is very often deferred by stumbling plot-lines and flat characters, it’s never forgotten. Sooner or later, the author’s point hits home, and we can’t help but feel empathy for Magdalie and the hundreds of thousands of real-life Haitians in her situation. In that respect, at least, Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go is a success.

View all my reviews

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders (review by Shannon H. '16)

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was almost addicted, inhaling this collection of dark short stories at an alarmingly fast pace. George Saunders creates a world in which advertising and persuasion overcome rational thought - his stories read like television commercials, slowly convincing the reader that the grotesque and brutal scenes are real. One short story begins with a polar bear lamenting his doomed existence to repeat the same patterns each day (he lives in a advertising scene). Each day he steals Cheetos from an igloo and is subsequently caught; afterwards, the owner of the igloo swings an ax to the polar bear’s head, and the day ends. Unsurprisingly, the polar bear engages in existential discussion and falls down the wormhole of philosophy. What a brilliant mix of realism and complete absurdism, and of course, it's great satire. Would highly recommend to anyone looking for some grim reality mixed with a dosage of humor and science fiction.

View all my reviews

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (review by Andrew R. '17)

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, a sort of novel-in-stories that unflinchingly paints a portrait of Native American life in the modern world, opens with a beautifully elaborate family tree: the names get progressively more Catholic, the adoptions and marriages and remarriages more convoluted, as the generations pass. It’s a fitting way to begin this collection. Almost every person on the tree is featured either as a narrator or as a protagonist of one of the stories, but in my mind the three members of the oldest generation mentioned are the real heroes of Love Medicine. The lives of Nector Kashpaw (introduced in “Wild Geese” as a brash young tribesman), his future wife Marie Lazarre (still a teenager in “Saint Marie”), and their sometime ally Lulu Lamartine (who comes of age in “The Island”) are chronicled in full, from adolescence to old age, and it’s their obsessions and fatal flaws that ultimately give the book wings. Love Medicine has a rocky start: its younger characters, not nearly as complex or engaging as their grandparents, open the collection in a less-than-impressive introductory sequence. But the later stories are beautifully enough rendered to do their subject, the Ojibwe nation, proud.

View all my reviews

Bone Gap by Laura Ruby (review by Andrew R. '17)

Bone Gap by Laura Ruby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap, while almost effortlessly unique in its setting and characters, too often gets bogged down in the tropes of other genres—especially star-crossed romance and magical realism—to feel entirely convincing or satisfying by the last page. The rural Illinois town that protagonists Finn and Roza inhabit is summed up in consistent, symbolic motifs, which Ruby invokes whenever possible: bees, cornfields, gossip, and (most effectively) the “gaps” of the title. As successful as these images are, other aspects of the novel fall flat, ultimately distracting readers from the complexity of the setting. Classic scenes of teenage social cruelty, for instance, feel painfully out-of-sync with a rural setting that is otherwise frozen in the past, and incessant references to Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Blankets quickly grow stale—especially since Ruby seems oddly reluctant to refer to that novel by name. Perhaps most disappointing are the author’s halfhearted attempts at magical realism in certain scenes, which more frequently reek of coincidence than true enchantment. Roza and Finn’s shared story has plenty to commend it, especially to fans of less traditional YA fiction, but its restless shifting between disjunct genres rendered it difficult both to follow and to enjoy. - Andrew R. '17

View all my reviews