I really loved this. For my birthday last month, I was treated to a day of bookstores. A list was made of stores I hadn’t visited yet and I found thisI really loved this. For my birthday last month, I was treated to a day of bookstores. A list was made of stores I hadn’t visited yet and I found this treasure at the first of the stores we visited. I was the only one of the bunch that is an obsessive lover and collector of books but all of us were completely entranced with the Glass Bookshop.
Though not a big store it was filled with many beautifully curated books and all of us bought something. There was a huge display table full of beautiful books and I was immediately drawn to I Athena. The cover was stunning, but the book being about a woman, who as a child had been misdiagnosed as “profoundly retarded” when in fact she had been made deaf and mute by a fever, immediately captured my attention. I was also pleased to find it was written by an author that was a local (in fact this bookshop had many books by local authors and I took a few home with me)
This book was so beautifully written. Athena’s voice is written with a rich depth and heart and I am going to miss her now that I’m finished the book. I thought the settings throughout the book very well written and the author is obviously very knowledgeable on the topic. I have a brother who is disabled intellectually and his disability began in the early sixties and so this book and Athena’s quest to just be herself resonated deeply for me. My brother and I lived with terrible abuse and consequently we bonded in a way that no other member of the family could. For a while it was just he and I against what felt like an overwhelmingly terrifying world and we clung to each other. We had our own way of communicating and playing and I always knew and understood when he was unhappy or suffering and I also knew how to help him through it. I have not seen my brother in over twenty years. My father keeps us apart and my brother has no agency, no rights and no voice in which to advocate for his wishes, and I have no rights either. So this book resonated on a very personal level for me.
I appreciated how well the author had shown the transition from institutions to group homes and how much things have changed, and how much things still need to change, and how complex the issue can be between care and agency for those with intellectual disabilities.
This book is going to be with me for a long while and may in fact be one of my favourites for the year. My only quibble is sometimes I wondered how Athena could be so intellectually advanced and articulate given her situation, though it is explained later in the book, in the early chapters, I was wondering how this fabulous articulate voice was possible. Perhaps having a little experience and even having dated a deaf boy and had taken sign language courses made it difficult in the beginning to suspend my disbelief and it took me out of the story sometimes. But, that is a very minor quibble. The book was amazing and a definite contender for best of the year for me. ...more
Solid collection of speculative horror/ sci-fi stories that were consistently compelling, well written and kept me coming back to them, which for me iSolid collection of speculative horror/ sci-fi stories that were consistently compelling, well written and kept me coming back to them, which for me is a good indicator that this author’s work is something special, as I sometimes struggle with the short story format. Not with this book though and I’ll be adding the author’s books to my wishlist. I noticed on Amazon that she has 3 books coming out in 2024 and Ima gonna get them all! ...more
DNF @ 27% After an initial strong first chapter, the book began to lose it’s charm for me as it progressed. I don’t enjoy first person narratives by wDNF @ 27% After an initial strong first chapter, the book began to lose it’s charm for me as it progressed. I don’t enjoy first person narratives by women whom I don’t find likeable. Those books quickly become a grind for me and even the aunties couldn’t save it. It seemed highly improbable as the story progressed. Overall, just not my cup of tea....more
“Sometimes it’s better to just let history be a heap of fragments. Best not to connect the dots, instead le3.5 I have some mixed feelings about this.
“Sometimes it’s better to just let history be a heap of fragments. Best not to connect the dots, instead let it be one damn thing after another, a tragic picturesque.”
A quote from the book that summarizes perfectly what the experience was like reading this. Motl, a Jewish middle aged man living in Lithuania at the time when the Nazi’s invaded sets out on a quest to recover his testicles (I kid you not) that were shot off and left on a glacier in Switzerland in the First World War. What follows is a nightmare journey as he encounters a good deal of people displaced and in the worst situations possible as Nazi’s, and sadly Lithuanian’s, set about ridding themselves of ‘the Jewish problem’. These parts of the book are so beautifully and heartbreakingly written, that as I was recounting to my daughter a particular scene, I was in tears. When the story is focused on those things, the prose is sparing and it’s all the more impactful for being so. I’m sure there are parts of this book that will continue to haunt me.
But there were things that I struggled with. Partly, it was the structure. The book is written like stories being recounted, as though someone is just telling their memory to you. This serves the story, in that it is literally Motl sharing his memories and the memories of others, but it makes the narrative feel choppy and chaotic. Motl has a good deal of snappy one liners that after a while got to be a chore and also contributed to him and other characters not feeling fully fleshed out. There was a distance between what was happening and how the characters felt. Being that I’m very much a character driven reader this was a weakness for me. Though Motl was what could be termed a character with his humour and quirkiness, he never truly felt fully fleshed out to me.
About 2/3s of the way, the book kind of comes off the tracks and gets pretty bizarre. It’s at this point of the narrative where the author tries to connect what was happening to the Jews to what happened to the Indigenous people. I think, partly why it didn’t work for me is that there was just so much going on that the added concept was just too much. I understand the reasoning and the concept he was going for but by that point the whole cowboy thing was just feeling really overdone, something I’m a little sad about because that is what drew me to the book in the first place. Added to that, the story gets pretty strange, so that last 30% felt long and I was feeling that impatience I feel to be done when I’m not fully engaged with a book. So while there were elements to the story that didn’t quite work for me I’m still glad I read this. It seems the word Nazi gets thrown around a lot for what seems the most trivial things. Books like this are so important....more
I’m in a bit of a quandary as I write this review. I can’t really decide if I liked this or not. Part of the difficulty is the 3 person POV and the faI’m in a bit of a quandary as I write this review. I can’t really decide if I liked this or not. Part of the difficulty is the 3 person POV and the fact that only one of them felt fleshed out and compelling. The younger voices seemed flat, uninteresting and not very likeable, at least for the first two thirds of the book. I felt no immediacy to their lives or the situations they were in and that is problematic when two thirds of the book is devoted to their perspective. But Aunt Lydia’s voice is where the book shines for me. Her voice is cunning, ruthless and determined. She seemed fully fleshed out. I got a deeper sense of the reasoning for why things had been set up by the aunts in the way they were by reading Lydia’s narrative and the way the women had suffered at the onset of Gilead’s creation. Even the horror of Particicution and the unleashing of the monstrously suppressed anger of the Handmaid’s upon those to be punished made a terrible sense when viewed from the the backdrop of Aunt Lydia’s narrative. I think had there been more of Lydia and less of the other two this would have been a much stronger book.
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