Customer Reviews

The Necessary Grace to Fall

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Gina Ochsner proves that writing truly is an art.

In "The Necessary Grace to Fall," Ochsner deals with the complex theme of death in even more complicated story lines that actually force the reader to think.

Ochsner writes beautifully, without veiling anything, to appeal to any person that has been touched by loss in one way or another. Her stories range from dealing with death, to the process of dying, and even experiencing life after death. Her ideas are creative and are fluidly and successfully portrayed.

I strongly recommend this book if you love to read quality literature.

Gina Ochsner is a remarkably gifted writer who has produced a stunning first book, The Necessary Grace To Fall. These are beautifully crafted short stories, but their excellence comes primarily from Ochsner's abilities as a story-teller, skillfully juggling all of the tools of fiction to achieve the maximum impact, rather than from her ability to compose rich yet disciplined prose. She chooses her words well, but the style never gets in the way of the story and its unfolding. Her characters are complex and alive. Ochsner makes them open up on the page, and the reader comes to know them intimately as they explore their own thoughts and feelings.

Ochsner's fiction employs unusual settings, which are, for the most part, remote and exotic. Many of her stories are set in the very cold regions of the earth where the elements are extremely harsh and the inhabitants' lives are ruled by the stark realities of severe weather. In addition, her landscapes often feature prominent reminders of the forces of history that shape the characters' fates: the ruins of bombed out buildings, the exposed corpses of ethnic cleansing victims, or the cultural echoes of The Holocaust. Carefully selected sensory details bring a vivid sense of reality to these settings. You feel like you're there, breathing the air, walking the ground. In many of her stories, the setting itself acts as a character, with a life of its own, and the human characters' interior lives are inextricably interwoven with the life of the place. The reader senses that these stories couldn't have happened anywhere else other than where Ochsner placed them.

Death is a common theme in these stories, yet, they are not morbid, although at times they are gruesome. At the same time, there is much dark humor, or -- absent that -- a sense of acceptance. The stories do not have happy endings, but they aren't depressing, either. Above all, they make you think. In grim environments dominated by ice and snow, living unhappy lives where death is in the process of replacing life, and where love has been replaced by betrayal or loss, Ochsner's characters are nonetheless filled with an intense yearning that keeps them moving forward. One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is that, despite the dreadful nature of what is happening to these characters, there doesn't seem to be any bitterness in them. Rather, there is a dark wonder at the beauty of the world, even when it's at its worst. These are stories to read again and again. Very highly recommended.

The Necessary Grace to fall explores the tremulous boundaries between the living and the dead--that twilight territory in time and space, in the memory and the heart, where the living still shake hands with the dead. The themes of mercy, grace, hope and reneweal in graceless times slowly emerge as one story builds upon another. I highly recommend this book both for its literary imagination and technique. Quite possibly it will change your life.

Ms. Ochsner's uniquely elegant prose provides the most dour character with grace. Each of the book's eleven stories provides the reader with the same.

Gina Ochsner has a wonderful literary voice. This book marks the beginning of great things to come.

Yes, the book is about death: troubled people, after-death awareness, suicide, unfinished business. Some of the stories I enjoyed. One or two I didn't get, or seemed pointless. Ochsner really CAN write, though. I would probably buy or read another book by her, after reading the reviews first to see if it's on a subject more to my liking.

The author of this collection is a cheerful, cute young woman. She is funny and awfully nice. She lectured to my class once.

That being said, yeah, I have never quite understood this book. Her words, they're lovely. They fit together in new and beautiful ways.

But...the stories...they don't seem like stories. They just drift and wander in pretty words. They are a bunch of stuff that happened. Nothing to set your teeth into.

If you approach this book as poetry, you might be more satisfied with it.

Author did not understand that Russia is not a North Pole, and some Russians might read her books. The author has no knowledge about Russia, Russian names, and anything else. Of course there are some mentally disabled Russians, but the author place is also in the mental hospital.