NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Amy Ballard

Which is more important, the clan or the individual? In Jean Auel’s 500-page series opener, Cro-Magnon Ayla navigates the customs of her adoptive Neanderthal people while pondering what it means that she is “Other.” To assimilate, she must comply with clan rules with which she disagrees. Sometimes she chooses defiance. When her practice of hunting with a sling (a man’s privilege) is discovered, she is placed under a death curse. Ayla isolates in a secret cave, an apt metaphor for the forced solitudes of today’s coronavirus pandemic. As clan political dynamics shift, she must determine whether she can live under the rule of a leader who, despite her valued status as a medicine woman, systematically abuses her.

Since its publication in 1980, the novel and its five sequels in the Earth’s Children series have generated a body of criticism, favorable and unfavorable, around its historicity, feminism, and treatment of race, among other topics. For the quarantined in 2020, though, The Clan of the Cave Bear does what it emphatically must: transport the reader to another world.

The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. Penguin Random House, June 2002.

Reviewer bio: Amy Ballard writes and teaches in southern Idaho. Her fiction has appeared in Barely South Review and elsewhere. Find Amy at www.amyballard.com.

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Guest Post by Jacqueline Williams

Given to me as a birthday gift, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a manifesto on shared solitude and the different ways in which we try to overcome grief. One of the intriguing things about the book is the author’s choice to leave the narrator unnamed along with most of the characters. However, at no point does that choice prove as an obstacle to the reading experience; instead, it renders visible particular details about the personality of the characters thereby allowing the reader to connect more deeply with them.

The book is a fairly easy read about the narrator’s journey of simultaneously losing and gaining someone and the idea of collective grief. As literary fiction, the book is peppered with trivia on various literary writers such as Adrienne Rich, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka among many others. The characters too draw from the similar flavor of what it means to be a writer and the conflicts attached to the profession of writing.

My favorite part of the book is the bond shared between the narrator and Apollo the Great Dane. Nunez’s take on the human-dog relationship is unlike any other. She is spot-on in her representation of the contemporary nature of company that of being alone, together. She writes, “What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and greet each other?”

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books, February 2019.

Reviewer bio: My name is Jacqueline Williams and I’m currently pursuing M.A in English. My field of interests includes Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Medical Humanities.

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Guest Post by Kristín M Hreinsdóttir

The End of the Ocean is a novel by Maja Lunde who is a Norwegian author. I started to read this book because it was due to be the next book to read in my book club. When I started reading, I was not sure what I was going to find. I had not at that point read something written by Maja Lunde and was not sure I was going to like it—before my reading, I was told it was about some environmental tragedy and also set in the future. Maybe it is my inner fear or some underlying knowledge about a tragedy like that which makes me dislike the subject, as well as my long-lasting dislike for books or stories set in the future. Why don’t I like stories like that? It is because I think it can be so often overdramatic and superficial and not real. Maja Lunde does the opposite and did hold my attention from beginning to almost the end.

Yes, it is about an environmental tragedy in the future, but it can also be in our time when the water is beginning to be the most important thing, though most of us are not willing to accept that. The novel is also about how the individual handles crises and difficult times, and is a protest against our greedy action against nature. Greed is something we have seriously to think about.

I liked how the book is written but sometimes it lacked flow, but it did not spoil the story so much. The characters are interesting and so well set up that you start to have some strong opinion on them, growing to like or dislike them very much. The weakest part of the story is the end; it almost ended so suddenly that the reader gets the feeling that there is something missing. You are left wanting to know what happens next. But that is maybe a plus that you start to wonder about the end and make your own.

The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde. HarperVia, January 2020.

Reviewer bio: My name is Kristín M Hreinsdóttir. I live in Iceland and have always like books and literature. I hold B.Ed. in information technology and media and an MA in museum study.

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Guest Post by Nick D’Onofrio

The whole Covid-19 pandemic got me into reading World War Z by Max Brooks. Published in 2007, the novel follows characters around the world as they struggle to survive a zombie outbreak that overtakes the globe. It takes place before, during, and after the zombie outbreak.

The narrator interviews a new survivor from a different part of the world for each chapter. Some chapters can be two pages long, while others can be twenty pages depending on what is being covered. From clearing the catacombs beneath Paris to managing satellites in space, the novel describes interesting scenarios that I would have never thought of when dealing with the undead.

All this being said, it does have a fair share of gore, which is expected in the zombie genre. So it is not for the faint of heart. What really drew me into picking up World War Z were the parallels people online were pointing out between the book and what has happened with the coronavirus. In the novel, the zombie outbreak starts in China and the government there tries to cover it up but it spreads. The United States is overconfident in its ability to contain the threat and promotes a fake drug, Phalanx, which supposedly cures the new disease. I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil too much.

I bought both the book itself and the audiobook. I follow along as it is being read, because that is how I absorb the information best due to my dyslexia. Even the audiobook has a different voice actor for each chapter. There were even some voices I recognized such as Nathan Fillion, Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg, and Martin Scorsese. However, I noticed the audiobook did have a few paragraphs and chapters missing in the beginning but that didn’t bother me that much.

World War Z by Max Brooks. Penguin Random House, October 2007.

Reviewer bio: I grew up in South Carolina but have lived in Switzerland. My traveling experiences have sparked my creativity and inspired me to write.

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Guest Post by Gerty Haas

In my several decades of reading, I have never encountered the likes of Zero Mirrors.

The narrator is a sentient dress worn by the main character, a woman living in a city of boredom. Her companion is a kidult: an adult who had his body modified so he’s the size of a child, because that’s the only time of his life when he was truly happy. The dress is a WAD (Wearable Assistive Data-integrator) worn by Melony, who is a Sashayer in EasyLiving City (not a dancer, because dancing is illegal). Her dearest friend is Robben, the original pilot of the Tree, the area’s greatest building and a grounded spaceship.

Abetted by her companions, Melony’s goal is to sashay through time to save her land from a Plant Plague arriving from the future. Along with being thoughtful and hilarious, this time travel story deals with gender identity, ageism, and family leadership. A key theme is the nature of human movement, from dancing to fleeing to slipping through time.

I’m not going to delineate the story except to say it has three endings: past, present, and future. I’m not able to tell you how often I had to stop reading because the book was making my brain rattle from astonishment or my stomach churn from hilarity or my eyes tear from a poignancy beyond the reality we’re stuck with. A word I hate to see in the description of any artwork is “visionary,” but the word is appropriate here. H. C. Turk has a vision of the future that makes our present seem insubstantial and ignorant, a timeframe that should be left behind. With this book, the reader can abandon that mediocrity for an enthralling experience beyond the norm, exactly equal to the book’s unique, stylish energy.

“You can’t imagine how heartsick you can be when you don’t have a heart.”

Zero Mirrors by H. C. Turk. September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Recently retired from the construction industry, Gerty Haas is an avid reader and art lover living in Florida, which thankfully is not part of The South.