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Book Review: Hangsaman
BOOK REVIEWS BY YWP ALUMNA IRIS ROBERT
"Hangsaman" by Shirley Jackson
I read this book for a really great course I took recently about the female grotesque in literature. I had read a bit of Shirley Jackson before, but I hadn’t read "Hangsaman." It’s another eerie-to-me book because it takes place on a near replica of the college I went to, Bennington College, and the characters are quite similar to some people I’ve met/lore I’ve heard. Shirley Jackson’s husband taught at this college, and it’s kind of her way of letting out frustrations over his actions while he was a literature professor (if you can see where this is going). It’s a bit of a treasure on campus, and everyone in my class was talking about how relevant it is to their lives, even though it’s set in the late 1940s.
The book opens with Natalie, the daughter of a very intelligent and sometimes cruel writer. Natalie is about to go to college, and something terrible happens to her, though it’s vaguely mentioned. When she arrives at college, all the girls are mean. Two girls frequently go into Natalie’s room to look at her stuff, and she feels like she has no privacy. She finds a literature professor, Arthur, who she really likes and admires. She strikes up an unlikely friendship with Arthur’s wife, Elizabeth, who is a former student of Arnold and is struggling with feeling like she’s isolated from everyone on campus.
Natalie has a difficult time adjusting to being at college, and meets a strange friend Tony. She floats between class and her dark room, sneaking into other rooms to steal small things. She feels out of place, except for the adrenaline rush when she’s with Elizabeth and gets closer to the enigmatic Arthur. She wants to impress everyone around her, especially the people who belittle her. The novel ends in a very vague but dreamy way, much like the incident that happens to Natalie at the beginning of the novel.
I would recommend this to anyone interested in Shirley Jackson’s work, the campus novel, mythic literature professors, and serious/seriously introspective narrators.
Happy reading!
Iris
Favorite Quotes:
“The reassuring bulk of the college buildings showed ahead of her, and she looked fondly up at them and smiled. As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.”
“Sometimes, with a vast aching heartbreak, the great, badly contained intentions of creation, the poignant searching longings of adolescence overwhelmed her, and shocked by her own capacity for creation, she held herself tight and unyielding, crying out silently something that might only be phrased as, "Let me take, let me create.”
“Perhaps—and this was her most persistent thought, the thought that stayed with her and came suddenly to trouble her at odd moments, and to comfort her—suppose, actually, she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite, a creature of deep lovely destiny; suppose she were someone else?”
"Bunny" by Mona Awad
This book has been hugely popular within the realm of campus novels and weird unsettling novels, a Venn diagram that I truly love. Mona Awad has written a few novels since "Bunny" (2019), which have also been popular, but not quite at this level.
"Bunny" is narrated by Samantha, a graduate English student on a scholarship at a small New England university (might I add, I was an English major at a small New England college and attended a graduate residency on a fellowship, which makes this novel feel all the more real and jumpscare-y). Samantha is in a small cohort, which is grad school lingo for a group that takes classes and workshops together and typically sticks together throughout the duration of their 2-year program. There is another group of girls in this cohort, and they’re kind of like the Regina George’s posse in Mean Girls. They all call each other ‘Bunny,’ and they’re fakely sweet to Samantha, which she absolutely hates.
Samantha is friends with Ava, who is not a part of the program, and is her source of comfort amid the saccharine and girly drama between the Bunnies. However, Samantha (like Cady Heron) is recruited to join the Bunnies, and what follows is an incredibly strange and disorienting section of the novel. I would say the first third is good, it sets up context and builds up to the big breaking point, but the second third is insane in a good way. I’ve never read anything like this. Samantha is in a total dream state, feverish and unable to tell what is real and what is a hallucination, and the reader is right there with her.
The Bunnies have a very strange hobby: they turn bunnies into their ideal men. The men are called hybrids, and they’re manufactured to be exactly what the characters want them to be: knowledgable about literature, tall, dark, handsome. There’s one problem, though. The Bunnies are not very good at creating the men, and the men eventually self-destruct. Samantha has no idea how to process this, but is too wrapped up in the unbelievability that she can’t step away.
I will say that I thought the last third of the novel was a bit of a letdown, and I didn’t love how the author ended the story, but the second third was so good that I can forgive the ending. I can’t tell you what happens, but it’s a big choice and I wish it had been a bit more serious about the implications of this plot twist. I would recommend this to anyone interested in very strange, unsettling, and catty grad school literature majors who make bad decisions and turn bunnies into cool boyfriends.
Happy reading!
Iris
Favorite Quotes:
“She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once.”
“Disorientation can be a very interesting space to occupy as a writer, Samantha. You should try it as an exercise over the holidays. It could be quite illuminating for you, I think.”
“Like we could hug and hug and hug until our ribs crack and our hearts burst and our lungs collapse and our arms break off and still. We’d still be hugging air. No body.”
"Sister Golden Calf " by Colleen Burner, reviewed by Iris Robert, March 2025
I bought this book at an incredibly exciting publishing conference in Kansas City last year. I was working as a poetry editorial assistant for a literary journal, and we flew out to attend the conference and sell copies of the journal. It was one of the coolest experiences for me as a lover of books - there were 500 booths of publishers selling copies of books at discounted rates, and they were a wonderful mix of contemporary and mainstream novels alongside indie and debut novels. This book struck me because of the title, and the woman working at the booth (Split/Lip Press) helped sell the plot to me.
This is a fairly short novel, narrated by Gloria, who is on a long and emotionally tense journey across Southwest America with her sister Kit. The sisters are grieving the loss of their mother, and are carrying on her practice of capturing invisible things in jars. They try to sell these jars to people they come across on their journey, who are all eccentric and change the way Gloria and Kit view the world.
Gloria is obsessed with a taxidermied calf with eight legs that she sees in a museum along the road. Many miles later, she splits from Kit to find her way back to the calf to save it. (This reminds me of the poem “Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin - I think about it all the time. It has a similar vibe to Gloria’s relationship with the eight-legged calf). The calf symbolizes something deeper to Gloria, some kind of visible to the invisible that she has been collecting for years.
I thought this was a really interesting and unique read. The writing is extremely poetic, almost like a prose poem. I really enjoyed the other characters who Gloria and Kit come across, and the bond between Gloria and Kit. I did think the story slowed down in the middle, but it fit with the very hot and dizzy, long stretch of highway, dreamlike narration from Gloria. I recommend this to anyone interested in strange speculative fiction, sisters, and invisible things.
Happy reading!
Iris
Here are some great quotes:
“Bonnie’s jar had sat on the mantel for not quite a year next to jars of SWAN DREAM, LIVING WICK, PETRIFIED AIR, TEEMING PERIPHERY, her prized possessions handed down from each generation of matrilineal ephemeris’s, all labeled to identify what was unseen inside.”
“The jars now contain such things as: SOMEONE ELSE’S DREAMS, NIGHTMARES, BELL CHIMES, A LAST BREATH, LAST WORDS, THE BIG PLUNGE, LATE AFTERNOON DREAM, DEAD LIGHT, NIGHT GREASE, STRATOSPHERE, VOID, COLD STREAMS OF LOGIC, HOLES, SMOOTH, CLOUD FEELING, POINT OF AIM, and SOULS OF WILD ANIMALS, SOULS OF DOMESTICATED ANIMAS, SOUL OF A WILD PERSON (a family heirloom).”
“The calf, the calf, my calf. My heart throbs, I can feel my pulse in my fist. I think of my love as some kind of holy grail, sacred, but not untouchable. Do objects long for us when we aren’t there? (Does the Honda miss me, maybe?) If it was once alive - or parts of it were - is it really an object? When is that transference?”
"Autobiography of Red" by Anne Carson, reviewed by Iris Robert, February 2025
This is a very strange and intriguing book I read for the first time a few months ago. I had read some of Anne Carson’s work before, and I had been interested in "Autobiography of Red" for a while since it is a novel in verse based on Greek mythology (two things I think are pretty cool). There are several different parts in this book, and it feels almost like a collage of sorts. It begins with an introduction to Stesichoros, the writer whose lyric poem about the myth Geryoneis inspired Carson to write this book. This section sets the foundation for the real-life understanding of the myth of Geryoneis, which Carson twists and pulls apart and completely shifts in some aspects, while staying true to the core of the myth.
The book moves to fragments written by Stesichoros, written as short poems that are abstract and quite lyrical, then two appendixes that further a sort of questioning of the characters in the myth. Then, the autobiography begins. This is narrated in verse and explores the story of Geryon, a boy with red wings. He starts writing an autobiography when he is 5, to capture the difficulties of his childhood. He loves his mother and taking pictures, two things that follow him throughout his life. He meets Herakles, who eventually leaves him in the middle of their relationship. They reconnect later and travel to Buenos Aires with Herakles’s partner Ancash.
The story is strange and dreamlike. The lines of dream and reality are blurred, and Geryon’s wings help him travel between the two states of consciousness. Geryon’s childhood experiences remain in his mind throughout his later life, and he often discusses the impact of childhood (very lyrically). The book ends with an imagined interview with Stesichoros, who is charming but resistant to being asked questions. It’s a very interesting way to end the story, bringing the narrative back to Stesichoros but imagining a voice for him.
I really enjoyed how multi-narrative this book is. There’s the narrative of Stesichoros being a poet, the narrative of Geryon being a young boy feeling awkward because of his wings then an adult in love with faulty people, and the narrative of Carson herself imagining this world where there is so much more depth to the characters of Greek mythology and their writers. This is a great introduction to Carson’s work and a really interesting example of a novel in verse. I recommend this to anyone interested in Greek mythology, epic poems, and speculative fiction. (Also, there is a full PDF available if anyone is interested in reading it online).
Happy reading!
Iris
Here are some quotes:
“The word each blew towards him and came apart on the wind. Geryon had always had this trouble: a word like each, / when he stared at it, would disassemble itself into separate letters and go. / A space for its meaning remained there but blank. / The letters themselves coulomb found hung on branches or furniture in the area” (26)
“Geryon was a monster everything about him was red. Geryon lived on an island in the Atlantic called the Red Place. Geryon’s mother was a river that runs to the sea the Red Joy River Geryon’s father was gold. Some say Geryon had six hands six feet some say wings. Geryon was red so were his strange cattle” (37).
“As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this” (54).
"Lunch Poems" by Frank O’Hara, reviewed by Iris Robert, January 2025
This is a short but sweet collection of poems by one of the most famous members of the New York School of Poets. It was first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series. I took a class on the New York School a few semesters ago and really enjoyed a deep dive into Frank O’Hara’s work, beyond my base knowledge of “Having a Coke With You” and that line “oh Lana Turner we love you get up” (an absolute banger of a final line). The idea of Lunch Poems is that they were written during O’Hara’s lunch breaks while he worked at the MET as an art curator. You can definitely see this in his work: many of the poems discuss art pieces or art as a process, or they follow O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” style (he described his poems in this way because they usually follow a speaker/O’Hara throughout New York City seeing certain things or doing certain things). His nonchalance and the generally chill, vibey tone to the poems really feel like a summertime lunch break in the city.
In a lot of these poems, it's fun to see O’Hara’s friends making an appearance. Other poets he wrote with or artists he would have dinner with frequently show up in his writing. In some ways his poems are love letters to his friends. It’s also quite lively to see the city through his eyes: everything is exciting, everything is moving, and he’s just so happy to be alive and in love. There are still serious aspects to these poems, and not everything is glowy and happy. O’Hara considers the impactful death of Billie Holiday in one poem, as well as the deaths of his close friends. Still, these are discussed in a bit of a flippant way, as if an aside along his stream of thoughts.
I first read this collection a couple of years ago, and I liked it, but it’s definitely grown on me now that I’ve read more about O’Hara and the era he was creating in. It was a super lush period for poetry and art, and O’Hara was completely immersed in this constant churning out of work. I like this collection because it feels like you’re reading from O’Hara’s mind directly, following his quick train of thoughts and observations. I recommend this book for anyone interested in exuberant but subconsciously introspective poems.
Happy reading!
Iris
Here are some favorite lines:
“It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored cabs” (15)
“oh oh god how I’d love to dream let alone sleep / it’s night / the soft air wraps me like a swarm it’s raining / and I have / a cold I am a real human being with real ascendancies / and a certain amount of rapture what do you / do with a kid / like me if you don’t eat me I’ll have to eat myself” (74)
“there is no snow in Hollywood / there is no rain in California / I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful / but I have never actually collapsed / oh Lana Turner we love you get up” (78)
"Agua Viva" by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Iris Robert, December 2024
This is one of my most recent reads recommended by a friend. It’s 85 pages and translated from Portuguese, written by one of the most famous Brazilian writers (born in Ukraine), Clarice Lispector. I bought the book because I had seen it mentioned all over the internet alongside other books I’ve really enjoyed, but I was a bit hesitant because the blurb on the back of the cover is vague: “an unordered meditation on the nature of life and time” that is “emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically radical.” I would say now this is a fair description of the book – in its short pages is a thorough, at times emotionally heightened and achy, exploration and outpouring of passion for writing, time, and the self. This would be a great companion read with "The Waves" by Virginia Woolf, which has a similarly lyrical, meandering, nonlinear exploration of the self (another one of my book recommendations in this series!).
"Agua Viva" is written in short paragraphs, sometimes only a sentence of two. The language is insistent and the narrator speaks directly to the reader, sometimes implicating the reader in the narrator’s pain or anger (as the reader is witness to the dissolution of the narrator’s sense of self and in some ways is made to feel culpable – in other words, the narrator is lowkey losing it). The narrator discusses writing as a creative birth/rebirth, in which the act of writing is the act of finding oneself. There are so many great quotes in this section/following this line of thought (it wouldn’t be fair to say there are certain sections or chapters within the narrative – moreso just thematic lines or thoughts that progress and stem outward into new thoughts. Very similar to the way a diary entry or letter to a friend would move from topic to topic).
I really enjoyed how Lispector drew a lot of passion and desire for writing into this narrative. Sometimes I find that writers talking about writing are the same, but this was a particularly unique outlook. I’ve seen this book compared to "Letters to a Young Poet" by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I haven’t read in a while, but is fairly similar in its meditations on life and writing. I would also say there’s a hint of "The Rings of Saturn," by W.G. Sebald (a favorite of mine) in the nonlinear storytelling and the obsessive narration, though "The Rings of Saturn" is completely opposite in the sense that there is no interest in the self and all of the interest is in the world (but the world reflects the self – the struggles of the world are the struggles of the self. It’s very meta and the kind of book you have to read multiple times to see how all of the pieces fit together and why the mention of a certain object, animal, or person returns 100 pages later seemingly out of nowhere).
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Lispector and looking for a short but engaging read, especially something lyrical and leaning toward poetic. There is no dialogue and there are no other characters – this is an entirely obsessive study of the narrator.
Happy reading!
Iris
Here are some quotes:
“I pin down sudden instants that carry within them their own death and others are born— I pin down the instants of metamorphosis and there’s a terrible beauty to their sequence and concurrence” (7).
“I write to you as an exercise in sketching before painting. I see words. What I say is pure present and this book is a straight line in space. It’s always urgent, and a camera’s photometer opens and immediately closes, but keeping within it the flash” (12).
“So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word — between the lines — takes the bait, something has been written (15).
“I’m being antimelodic. I take pleasure in the difficult harmony of the harsh opposites. Where am I going? and the answer is: I’m going” (23)
"The Making of a Poem" by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, reviewed by Iris Robert, November 2024
This is an “anthology of poetic forms” co-written by Mark Strand, a great poet who wrote the poem that includes the lines “In a field / I am the absence / of field” (very beloved by one of my former lit professors). In this anthology, Strand and Eavan Boland lay out a very comprehensive and thorough guide of different poetic forms and examples of them, like the villanelle, sestina, pantoum, sonnet, ballad, pastoral, and ode, alongside open/free verse poems without a form. This is a really great way to learn more about poetic craft while also reading a variety of different poets.
Poets in this anthology include: Elizabeth Bishop, Wendy Cope (if you know “The Orange” that ends with “I love you. / I’m glad I exist”), John Ashbery, John Keats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Lucie Brock-Broido, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, and many more. The selection of poets is quite broad and spans many centuries, all the way from Anne Bradstreet in the 17th century, who was the first Puritan woman to be considered a writer, to Joy Harjo who was the US Poet Laureate from 2019-2022.
I enjoy reading this type of anthology that explains the craft of the poem and what it is doing alongside the actual text. I like reading collections but sometimes I’m left wondering what the form is and why it is using a specific meter, line break, line count, or repetition, so having this sort of manual to read with the poems makes it a lot easier to understand the poems themselves. I’ve also become more interested in the theory behind what I read, which I think ultimately makes my own writing stronger because I have a better sense of what I can do with my writing in terms of staying within a box or breaking down the confines.
Mark Strand writes an interesting and inspiring introduction about his own relationships to poetry and what he has discovered through both reading and writing, which has some really great advice for writers. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the craft/historical side of writing, especially various forms of poetry. (Also, I found this at a really incredible bookstore in Middlebury, VT that I’ve been telling everyone I know about for years. It’s called Monroe St. Books, and you can order from their online catalog, but it’s so worth it to go to their store if you can. It’s a giant warehouse with 100,000+ books, meticulously organized, and has some truly incredible finds).
Happy reading!
Iris
Here are some quotes:
“The poem was saying things that I wished I could say” (xviii)
“When I say ‘lyric poems’ I mean poems that manifest musical properties, but are intended to be read or spoken, not sung” (xxii)
“This is often the case with good poems—they have a lyrics identity that goes beyond whatever their subject happens to be. They have a voice, and the formation of that voice, the gathering up of imagined sound into utterance, may be the true occasion for their existence. A poem may be the residue of an inner urgency, one through which the self wishes to register itself, write itself into being, and, finally, to charm another self, the reader, into belief. It may also be something equally elusive—the ghost within every experience that wishes it could be seen or felt, acknowledge as a kind of meaning” (xxiv)
“A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and wittiness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves” (xxiv).
"Women Talking" by Miriam Toews, reviewed by Iris Robert, October 2024
This is a really incredible and moving novel that I read for the first time in one of my literature courses last term. It’s based on a true story and, though troubling and painful at times, a really gorgeous and memorable imagining of what the lives of these women might have been like. In the early 2000s in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, a group of women realize that the shared nightmare they’ve had of their bodies being violated in their sleep is actually a reality. In this novel, Toews imagines a group of women discovering this truth and discussing, alongside August, the extremely caring and intelligent man who takes the minutes of their meetings, what their next steps are. The women lay out three potential options: flight, flee, or forgive. They can either fight the men who have assaulted them, flee the colony and start a new life together, or forgive the men for their actions and continue their lives where they are.
The women meet in a hayloft for several days to discuss, argue, cajole, and comfort one another as they process what has happened to themselves and each other. Some women are extremely angry and can only imagine fighting the men; some women believe that, according to their religion, their only option is to forgive the men and move on. There are inherent tensions between these two sides, as well as the tensions between two different families and the older and younger generations.
August, whose family was excommunicated from the colony, sits quietly in the corner and writes down everything that the women say. He takes this seriously, even though he sometimes questions why he is doing it, as the women are unable to read and write. His own story of conflict within the colony and abroad weaves into the narrative and really makes him a source of empathy and understanding. His peaceful nature is a huge contrast to the violence the women have faced from other men.
What I love about this novel is how layered it is: love and violence, religion and God, forgiveness and complacency, mothers and daughters, comrades and enemies, what’s spoken and what’s unspoken. All of these themes and ideas are intertwined seamlessly, and it’s impossible for one to exist without the other. The women’s discussions are fraught at times but also quite affectionate, funny, and philosophical. The implications of each of their options grow larger as they run out of time before the men return from a trip away. As each day passes, they get simultaneously closer and further away from determining what they should do and how their actions impact their children, their belief system, and their colony as a whole.
Happy reading!
Iris
Here are some quotes I wanted to share with you:
“If I can understand how these crimes may have occurred I am able to forgive these men. And I am almost able, certainly from a distance, to pity these men, and to love them” (109).
“Several of the people we love are people we also fear” (53).
“Why does the mention of love, the memory of love, the memory of love lost, the promise of love, the end of love, the absence of love, the burning, burning need for love, need to love, result in so much violence?” (214).
"The Waves" by Virginia Woolf, reviewed by Iris Robert, September 2024
The first time I read this book, I got to the end of the first section and I put it down. It felt exhausting trying to keep track of the loose, flowy, soft narrative that switches seamlessly between six different characters in an indistinct space and time.
I didn’t pick up the book again until two years later, in my Experimental Fiction by Women class. I thought it would be a chance to revisit the book and maybe I would enjoy it more this time, reading it with a class of people I knew and a professor I adored. On my second read, I found so much more to love: extremely lyrical words, characters who exist in a dream state, objects and thoughts that drift into and away from the narrative. There was a real beauty to the first passage, when the characters are children, that I had missed on my first read. I had been too quick to label the book as ‘difficult’ or needing too much from me as a reader. With more patience, and more interest in experimental fiction as a genre, I started to love this book.
The Waves was first published in 1931, but it feels quite timeless. The six characters, Bernard, Jinny, Rhoda, Susan, Louis, and Neville grow up together and their lives are intertwined as they attend school together, up until they become adults and start their own families. The death of a close mutual friend alters their lives and perspective of themselves, and makes the indistinct lines between their bodies blur together even more. The narrative is reflective of the characters' inner feelings — you can feel the nausea, nostalgia, and naivety through every word.
The sections where the characters narrate what happens and speak about themselves are referred to as the soliloquies, and the other sections describe the gradual rise and fall of a sun on a beach landscape. The waves (the titular waves) are quiet and calm, then stormy and dark, then finally become smooth by the end of the narrative.
Thinking of a story as a rise and fall, like an ebb and flow of a wave, is very fitting for this novel. Imagine the beginning of a wave rising, the middle as the highest point of the wave, and the end as the moment when the wave hits the shore and ripples back outward.
This novel has also been described as a Bildungsroman (a term I just learned!) which is a novel that is specifically focused on a character’s (or several characters’) progression from child to adult. What differentiates this from a coming of age novel is that the move from childhood to adulthood is the story itself, whereas a coming of age can really be any genre (sci-fi, horror, etc).
The formative years of the characters in The Waves are really the main plot, especially in the first half, and then in the second half we see the impacts of those formative years as the characters become adults with their own children and grandchildren. I recommend this to anyone interested in coming of age stories, poetic language, and an extremely layered and metaphorical story.
Happy reading!
Iris
Here are some quotes to give you a taste of this book:
"This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver." (23)
"As the train passes by these red rocks, by this blue sea, the term, done with, forms itself into one shape behind me. I see its color. June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, 'Consume me.' "(64)
Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose, Book Review by Iris Robert, April 2024
This month on Iris's Bookshelf, I want to talk about Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose. This is an essay collection that I found through a quote posted on Instagram. I don't read a lot of essay collections (or nonfiction, in general) but I really like Chew-Bose's storytelling and writing style. The essays are philosophical and poetic, exploring writing, identity, and coming of age as a young writer. I love her writing style and the way she describes feelings and situations.
Here is one of my favorite quotes, and the one that I discovered this book through: "I've been so young for so long and so old for longer – so heart-wrinkled and naive all at once. So brow-furrowed but heart-open too; a detective. Snooping yet easily sidetracked. I'll believe anything because I want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts." This language is so carefully chosen, and electric – the combination of heart-wrinkled and heart-open, brow-furrowed but easily believing anything.
On her relationship with her parents: “What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.”
On love and writing (two major themes of the collection): “First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb. Like writing, occasionally, it feels combustive. Greedy. It’s unsophisticated and coaxes you into making promises about the far future and imbibing the moment. Into growing gullible fast, frantically so, and forgetting about yourself – about your exception. Writing does the same. It lays siege.”
I give this collection 4/5 stars. It resonates with me and is engaging and dynamic. I recommend this for anyone looking to read personal and philosophical essays that deal with perspectives of beauty, relationships, writing and being a writer, and coming into your identity.
Happy reading!
Iris
Jazz by Toni Morrison, Book Review by Iris Robert, March 2024
This month on Iris's Bookshelf I want to talk about Jazz by Toni Morrison. I absolutely love Toni Morrison and I think she's one of the best storytellers – her writing is gorgeous and she puts together a story and pulls it apart in such a stunning way.
This book is not talked about as often as some of her other books, like The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, or Beloved (which you should absolutely read, too!) and the subject matter isn't quite as intense, though it is still violent. I read all of Morrison's books back-to-back when I was fifteen, and this is a particularly memorable one. This novel is set in 1926 Harlem (the Harlem Renaissance plays a large role), and it's about a love triangle, a marriage, and a murder. This is another book that is nonlinear and the narrative travels its own unique path, full of tangents and improvisations, much like jazz music itself.
The setting of New York City is particularly important to this novel, and the story ricochets off of the city, echoing and interacting with the history and humans who live there. The narrators trade places and riff off one another, and the narrative flows through this swap.
Check out the first paragraph: "Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the funeral and cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, 'I love you.'"
This novel is dynamic and lyrical. I give it 3.5/5 stars and I recommend it to anyone looking for a funky, musical, tragic, exciting read.
Happy reading!
Iris
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, Book Review by Iris Robert, February 2024
This month on Iris's Bookshelf, I want to talk about another old favorite of mine, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. I've read this book several times, and I love it every time. It became even more meaningful when I found out that Hinton was only 15 when she wrote the book (after failing her creative writing class!) which is so inspirational, especially because of how wildly successful it has been. The Outsiders is about a gang of teenage boys in the 1960s, split into the greasers and the Socs, who are separated by privilege and loyalties. The Socs can do anything and everything without consequence, because they're wealthy, privileged, and can pay their way out of problems. The greasers, on the other hand, have to take responsibility for their faults and have to fix their real world problems with real world solutions.
The narrator, Ponyboy, lives with his brothers and runs around town with them and their friends. They stay away from the Socs except when they're provoked (often) but fall in love with the Soc girls (doomed) and get involved in fights and accidents (tragic). There's something about the closeness of the greaser boys, between Ponyboy and his friend Johnny and between Ponyboy and his brothers, that is particularly memorable and emotional.
There are countless quotes from this book, but I want to highlight the most famous one:
“It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.”
This speaks to the relationships that Ponyboy and his friends try to have with girls from the Soc group, in which they start to see similarities between their lives that seem so deeply different in socioeconomic status.
Another quote that shows the familial roles and loyalties:
“We can do our family members down as much as we like. But the second an outsider insults them our blood seethes. At the end of the day I don’t like him – but I love him. And I see my own failures in him.”
The book was the inspiration for the 1983 film, The Outsiders, a coming-of-age crime drama film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. I give this book 4.5/5 stars. I read it at a time when it meant a lot to me, and the ending was particularly heartbreaking. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read about the freedom and violence of teenagers in the 1960s, the alliances and failures and loves and traumas that plague them.
Happy reading!
Iris
Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin, Book Review by Iris Robert, January 2024
This month on Iris's Bookshelf, I want to talk about Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin. I found this book in a bookshop in Brattleboro, VT, and I picked it up because of the striking cover.
I've never read anything like this, where the writing is so electric, bursting with descriptors and metaphors, and nonlinear in an abstract and absurd way.
Caren Beilin is a Vermont author, and brings such a unique voice to Iris, the narrator (great name, by the way). The story is about 36-year-old Iris, the scapegoat of her family, who receives a package of letters from her father one day, bringing back unfortunate memories of her past and familial troubles. She escapes to the countryside and befriends a woman on a farm, and the story runs wild from there.
Beilin writes metaphors in such an interesting way, where she compares one thing to another thing, but then compares that to another thing, and then compares it to yet another thing, until there are so many layers within one sentence, but each layer is intentional and tightly woven.
There are so many great quotes from this book. Here's one: "A scapegoat does not believe, and I'll say this twice, that anything coming out of her mouth can be heard. Not without SCREAMING. Not without a trick. It does not work to say, This hurts. It does not work to say, Please. . . . A scapegoat doesn't think she can ask. No, she doesn't believe in honest questions."
And another quote (one of the big themes of this book is the dynamic between fathers and daughters and the tension of the father's letters to Iris): "The letters in my package were an evil archive, for sure, a father who hates his own daughter??? - no, who wouldn't mind destroying her - no, who desperately needs her love and wants to choke it out of her - who thinks she could sustain these horrible letters. Worst package of my life."
I give this book 4/5 stars for experimental creativity and startling, shocking, satisfying prose. I recommend this if you're looking for a funky, absurdist story that isn't traditional or traditionally told. It was one of four Vermont Book Award winners in 2022.
Happy reading!
Iris
Brutes by Dizz Tate, Book Review by Iris Robert, December 2023
This month on Iris's Bookshelf, I want to talk about Brutes by Dizz Tate. I absolutely love this novel (it's my Barbie movie) and I still have a few chapters left (I'm reading it slowly because I want it to last longer!).
This book is about a group of tweenagers in Falls Landing, Florida who all idolize this one girl Sammy, until she goes missing and their community is flipped around. I grew up in Florida, and this book is so evocative of those years in the sweaty heat with intertwined friendships that make you feel like a collective organism. Dizz Tate writes about this group so well and the tensions between the hierarchy and who gets which role. The narrative begins with the group in Florida after Sammy goes missing, and then, surprisingly, swaps to each girls' perspective as grown adults, away from their hometown and looking back on their childhoods and everything that happened.
I found this book through an Instagram video of book recommendations, and it was described as the "sticky, sickly friendships" which captures the setting and the relationships perfectly. Here is an interesting article about the book, describing its influences (The Virgin Suicides, Bunny). https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/dizz-tate-brutes
There are so, so many quotes that I love in this book. Some of my favorites: "No one looks at us and this gives us a brutal power." Much of this novel is about brutal power – from parents, between friends, in communities, to oneself. Being brutal and being called "brutes" is something this group hears a lot, and they start to like the power of it.
The writing is electric and rhythmic. Here's a sample: "When we wake up, the sun has just appeared, a thick red muscle bleeding low across the lake. We rub our eyes and stare. The women have returned to the ground. The hot air blurs around them. They seem deflated and move slowly through the morning's pink haze. They have abandoned their instruments and seem to be calling her name over and over. They look desperate, their determination lost. We giggle. We focus our binoculars on their mouths, the lowering and widening of their pleading jaws. 'Sam-my, Sam-my, Sam-my.' We can hear more sirens on the highway, and the faint noise of tourists from the hotels and into the theme parks across the lakes."
And another quote: "We smear eye shadow up to our eyebrows. We color and shine our lips with gloss. We smile. We shimmer. We feel like we do not exist." To me, this book is my childhood, when I would use all the makeup in my mom's makeup bag and run around with my friends getting into trouble, ignoring all the 'grown up' things happening around us. It's carefree, it's loud, it's silly, it's messy, it's sad.
I give this book a 4.5/5 and I completely recommend reading this!
Happy reading!
Iris
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Book Review by Iris Robert, November 2023
This month on Iris's Bookshelf, I want to talk about one of my old favorites. I first read this novel when I was about 9, and then I re-read it several more times after. This is the story of Mary, an orphan who moves to live with her recluse uncle in his mansion on an English moor. She meets her cousin Colin, who's been extremely sick his whole life and has to stay in his room, and other characters who care for and live near the mansion. She befriends a robin, who leads her to a secret garden on the property that had been abandoned for years and became overgrown.
I love how you can see Mary change and become an entirely different person over time. She starts off spoiled, selfish, and rude, but then she opens up to be caring, kind, and carefree. She and her cousin grow close and she helps him become healthy and experience the world in ways he hadn't before.
This book is really about the keeping of things you love: whether it is a garden, a family member, a friend, or yourself. It's not always easy to care for others, but there is so much more happiness and satisfaction from loving others.
Here is a favorite quote of mine: “And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.”
And here is another quote that I love: “Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”
I give this book a 3.5/5. I loved it when I was a younger reader and just getting into classics (around the time I was reading Black Beauty, The Wizard of Oz, etc.) and I also love it now. I definitely recommend this if it's your first time reading it, or if you're returning to it many years later.
Happy reading!
Iris
Open City by Teju Cole, Book Review by Iris Robert, October 2023
The narrator of the novel Open City is a Nigerian immigrant named Julius who lives in New York City. He walks around the city, travels to Europe, meets with old friends and makes new friends, and comes to terms with the tragic and unfortunate events in his life and the choices he's made. I liked how Teju Cole's novel flowed, and the tangents that made the narrative nonlinear, as well as the unexpected (and unsettling) final moments and questions left behind for the reader. This book reminded me of Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie because of the themes of Nigerian immigrants living in American cities and addressing issues of race, privilege, and love.
Here is a great interview with Teju Cole, talking about Open City, the nonlinear narrative, the identity of the narrator, and other interesting elements: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/conversation-teju-cole. I like how Cole expands on elements of the novel and we get to hear it from his perspective (I always like hearing from the author's perspective, because they see so clearly what sometimes appears to readers as a huge mess or question mark).
This is a quote that summarizes one of the plot themes of good, evil, belief, and what you make others know about you: “We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason.”
This is another quote that I think is particularly important to the narrative: “If you're too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.”
Overall, I give this book 3.5/5 stars. I liked the writing style a lot, and the extremely vivid and evocative descriptions. I thought the characters were complex and well developed, and I liked that the plot ran in circles and was more of a long description than a series of events that impact each other.
Happy reading!
Iris
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Book Review by Iris Robert, September 2023
I first read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott during a creative writing class I took this summer. I happened to find my copy at Goodwill for $2, and I was surprised by how much I liked it.
Sometimes I think that writing advice can be repetitive and drone on, but Lamott brings a fresh and humorous perspective to all areas of writing: first drafts, dialogue, plot, writer's block, and finding your voice. She includes anecdotes, prompts, and quotes from other books/poems/pieces of writing.
This is a helpful read for writers for both the advice and the ability to recognize yourself in Lamott's descriptions, as the young writer unsure of their voice, the writer who cannot continue their story no matter how many attempts, the writer who suddenly despises everything they've written, and the writer who doesn't know how or where or what to edit. Even though I read this for my class, I would absolutely have read it on my own (and I'll return to it, too).
Lamott talks about wonder and awe in writing, and how important it is to maintain. She writes, "This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of - please forgive me - wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.... I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world – present and in awe." I love this idea of seeing this anew and being in awe while writing – I think it's also a great prompt. What fills you with awe? What makes you feel most present?
Lamott also talks about character development: "My friend Carpenter talks about the unconscious as the cellar where the little boy sits who creates the characters, and he hands them up to you through the cellar door. He might as well be cutting out paper dolls. He's peaceful; he's just playing."
I really love this idea of creating character as paper dolls and just playing around with ideas and concepts in a carefree way, rather than being hard on yourself or getting caught up in specifics. It's always harder to write when you're critiquing yourself, rather than being open and playful with your ideas and seeing where they can lead.
Lastly, one of my favorite quotes from this book is actually a quote from another book, Rabbit, Run: "It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run: 'his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.'" This just perfectly describes the feeling of writing and finding your pace and your voice, and getting to the point of being comfortable and excited about what you're writing.
Overall, I would give this book 3.5/5 stars. I really enjoyed Lamott's advice, especially since I don't usually choose to read nonfiction books. I would definitely recommend this book if you are interested in learning more about the different elements of writing, or if you're looking for motivation to get past that stubborn writer's block.
Happy reading!
Iris
Iris Robert is a YWP alumna and graduate of Bennington College. You can contact Iris with questions, feedback on her reviews, or just to say hi by messaging her on the site at eyesofIris.