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.
In this imaginative collection of linked stories, “the borderlands” seem to refer not only to the territory along the U.S.-Mexico border–a landscape traversed by the central character, Jillian Guzmán, and her family–but also to metaphysical boundaries that are magically porous to Jillian: between life and death and between the material and spiritual worlds. Collectively, her experiences in these dimensions create a portrait of deep empathy, and of the powers of hope and redemption, even amid suffering.
In the simplest sense, Rage is a Wolf portrays one young woman’s quest to make a difference in the world and to find meaning in her life, outside of the boundaries of high school. But much to this credit of this imaginative and inspiring novel, her quest is nothing but simple, and it leads to transformative discoveries about herself and the world.
This wonderfully strange, thought-provoking, and hilarious novel defies simple categorization. Is it a study of the soulless mining of personal data for the greediest of ends? Is it a suspenseful tale of a battle of the wills–one Apollonian, the other Dionysian? Is it an artful melding of poetry and prose? Yes and yes and yes. As disparate as these elements may seem, in the end they add up to an entertaining, enlightening whole.
In a clothing shop at a local mall, Jesse Albright turns away from her ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, for a moment. When she turns back, she finds that Sophie has vanished, as if into thin air.
Six years later, as Marlene Adelstein’s gripping and affecting début novel begins, Sophie is still nowhere to be found, and authorities have all but given up on the search for her. But Jesse hasn’t. Although almost everything about Jesse’s life has changed–she’s withdrawn from friends and neighbors, split with Sophie’s father, Cooper, and taken to drinking heavily–she continues to hold out hope that Sophie might be alive, somewhere. And in what Cooper and others see as hoarding caused by grief, Jesse fills the home she once shared with him and Sophie with found objects, seeing them as clues that Sophie has sent her to decipher.
How do we attain and hold onto happiness? Although this question has been the implied or overt subject of countless self-help books, it has no neat or simple answers. The stories in Virginia Pye’s compelling new collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, acknowledge this reality in fresh and perceptive ways. And they allow us to witness transformational moments in the lives of characters who are seeking out happiness or life satisfaction, or struggling with its elusiveness.