In this moving and perceptive collection of linked stories, characters are at uncertain and unsettled times of their lives–perhaps, in an unsatisfying relationship or situation that they can’t quite bring themselves to leave, or in a liminal space between their life as it is (or was) and what it might potentially be. Although the characters rarely find clear answers or resolutions, they make profound discoveries about themselves, and about life.
What might be gained, or lost, by diving into the wreckage of one’s past? And what might one learn about herself, and those closest to her, in the process? This perceptive and darkly funny novel takes up these questions in multiple ways, conveying the dangers and possibilities of such a venture.
I’m grateful to Raven Chronicles Press for bringing this extraordinary historical novel, originally published in 1997, back into print. Set in nineteenth-century Mexico, the book is revelatory and inspiring on many levels. For one thing, it sheds light on the lives and struggles of Mexican Jews, who practiced their religion in secret for fear of persecution. For another, it immerses us in the lives of women who do the opposite of existing in the shadows, as many of their counterparts would have been forced to do at the time.
The following review is by Chris McGinley, an incredibly talented writer and the author of Coal Black: Stories, which I highly recommended in a Small Press Picks review. It’s an honor to feature Chris’s insights on Karen Salyer McElmurray’s captivating book. –Beth Castrodale, editor of Small Press Picks
There’s an excellent essay called “Hand Me Down” in Karen Salyer McElmurray’s new book, Voice Lessons. In it, the author recalls a dress her grandmother once made, now old and nearly threadbare. The collar is frayed, McElmurray notes, and the old-time pattern is wildly inappropriate for the scholarly event she attends in it. She says of her seamstress granny:
The passage evokes one of the central themes in McElmurray’s excellent “memoir in essays,” some published earlier but now collected in one mesmerizing book. Though the writing spans different periods in the author’s life and travels, it seems inevitably to return to this idea of ancestors, to the resourceful hill women who helped shape the author’s spiritual and artistic core, the women who raised her, grew her in fact, into the woman she eventually became. Throughout the book McElmurray pays tribute to these strong women, commonly the source material for her novels and poetry, and for her essays and her muse generally. In fact, the depiction of these women—mothers, daughters, aunts, and grannies—are achingly beautiful, especially since McElmurray never devolves into maudlin sentiment, never renders a portrait flatly or nostalgically. Instead, the book foregrounds the complicated relationships between the scholar/artist McElmurray–a writer, educator, and aesthetician–and the mountain women who have forever warned her not to “get above her raisin’.”
This powerful and moving debut novel paints a bittersweet portrait of a community’s struggles against forces that threaten to destroy it and also the dreams–and, sometimes, the lives–of its residents. Equally compelling are the stories of individuals involved in or affected by these struggles. Sometimes, they are left to rely on little more than their own resilience and, against all odds, a sense of hope.
