Through the first quarter of the novel, I was thinking of this as the story of two lovers. My take would’ve failed the Bechdel test, and I think, now, it’s really a tale of two sisters: Iris and Laura Chase. The girls would have passed, I think: even when
Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan and Elizabeth Strout: these are some of the writers whose stories about parenting, and being parented, stand out in my mind. Claudia Dey’s fiction could be included here, too, although her stories spiral around alienation and abandonment—the ways in which those who
Hosted by Cathy and Rebecca with weekly themes and a link collector, the first week of this event invites participants to “tell us about any novellas you have read since last NovNov” (it’s okay not to follow the five week’s themes exactly and, instead, allow them to mesh with
It’s a time of “political and intellectual crisis” in The Little Company. Sound familiar? Drusilla Modjeska’s introduction situates readers in Dark’s depiction of ordinary life in Sydney and Katoomba, in this time of “recession, nuclear threat and more failed expectations” in Australia. The Little Company is Dark’s seventh novel,
No need to debate the significance of the Oxford comma here—there’s no ‘and’ to stir the pot. One could easily mis-identify the story and add the conjunction. But this is not a story about a set of accessories. It is about a series of another sort. A series of
