Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary is a beautifully crafted novel that blends elements of fairy tales, magical realism, and historical fiction. Set mostly in a small, nineteenth-century French town, it follows the family of Henri Blanchard, who craft a unique kind of musical device. The writing is lyrical and imaginative, bringing a fully formed world to life with vivid descriptions and characters, and the plot unspools as smoothly as thread from a bobbin.
How do we find our way in life when so many things seem to be conspiring against us or limiting our choices? This insightful, sometimes heartbreaking, and often hilarious novel takes up this question from multiple characters’ perspectives. Each of their stories offers a nuanced exploration of a particular existential struggle and where it might lead, for good and for ill.
This gracefully written, heartfelt novel examines the risks and rewards of facing doubts and desires concerning the direction of one’s life, and of trying to act according to these feelings. It also considers the power of close friendships, and how these relationships can sustain us in ways that familial, or marital, bonds might not be able to.
In the acknowledgments section of this beautifully crafted, revelatory collection, Tara Lynn Masih mentions her realization, while putting the book together, that many of the stories are connected by the theme of disappearance. Indeed, the collection explores literal and metaphorical disappearances, and how these lead characters to transformative discoveries about themselves and, in some cases, about the spiritual world.
This searing, emotionally resonant story collection immerses us in the struggles of characters who, in many cases, are trying to make sense of the past, or of murky or troubled relationships–often, when they are at a crossroads in their lives. Haunting virtually all of the stories are traumas from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Linforth considers how chasms may exist between family members, or between (current or former) lovers–and how it may be possible to never fully connect with, much less understand, those with whom we share blood, or with whom we’ve shared our lives. Yet sometimes, those chasms can be bridged, and he captures such moments with powerful prose.
Through a powerful combination of prose, poetry, and visual art, The Benefits of Eating White Folks explores an enslaved woman’s determination to survive and persist amid a series of traumas that threaten to break her. And it connects her trials to issues of racial injustice that continue to afflict our country. The result is an unforgettable book, one that holds an unforgiving mirror up to American racism, past and present, showing its ineradicable toll.