Customer Reviews

Earthquake

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You feel like you are looking at film clips of Susan's life growing up. She is able to create vivid imagery with her words. There is an innocence which is permeated by a wry sense of humor as she recounts moments from her life growing up. The only fault is that it is too short!

Poet Simon Pettet, on the back cover, called this slim book, "A delightful coming-of-age memoir in which childhood's unflinching, candid appraisal creates hallucinogenic calm." An interesting observation, and one I can agree with up to a point -- I think the prose is dreamlike and a bit untethered to reality, and there is a calmness to the overall tone of the book, but it don't believe it ever reaches those heights of transcendence and disembodiment that Pettet suggests. Instead, it's a string of anecdotes and real-life vignettes that are delivered by well-crafted, highly deliberate sentence structures, which evoke interest but not connectivity between reader and subject. Susan and her three sisters, enigmatic father and non-descript mother, who all live in Alaska during the 1950s, are composites of characters, not fully-realized, breathing people with lives off the page. Again, the writing is strong, the images evocative and stirring at times, but the book begs to be longer than it is, with less anecdotal ditties and more depth and breadth of life. A pleasant diversion, but not a book that stays with you for long.

This is a must-read from possibly the greatest unknown author of our time. Brilliant!