Customer Reviews

Sarah Canary

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Out of nowhere, a white woman wanders into a Chinese railway workers' camp. The time is Winter, 1873. The place is the Washington Territory. The woman says nothing. (Nothing discernable, anyway.) No one can explain who the woman is, where she is from, or how she got there. This is the situation Karen Joy Fowler presents to the reader in this astounding, wonderful book.

`Sarah Canary' meets many different people on her strange journey and she affects the lives of everyone she meets. Four people in particular fall under her strange spell: Chin - a Chinese railway worker who seeks to take her back where she belongs; B.J. - an escaped mental patient; Harold - a huckster who wants to put Sarah in his traveling freak show; and Adelaide Dixon, a woman suffragist.

`Sarah Canary' is all about perceptions. Each of these four characters see Sarah as something slightly different. Their perceptions also cause their lives to each change in different and fascinating ways.

When I finished `Sarah Canary,' I realized that Fowler had taught me a lot about the times I live in now. Perceptions are the focus of the book, but Fowler also touches on the cultural differences of different types of people, prejudices, superstitions, and much more. After reading the book, I realized that I had come away with a better (but maybe not a more positive) picture of human nature.

From what I know about the history of the book, Fowler had a difficult time finding a publisher, not due to the book's quality, but rather the book's genre. It has none. It has been labeled historical fiction, Western, science fiction, comedy, mystery. It is all of these and none of these. `Sarah Canary' is impossible to pigeonhole. Maybe that's why I lot of people I talk to haven't read it. They're missing a gold mine. I hope you don't miss out. Read it and see why Fowler is one of the most gifted talents writing today.

381 pages

Karen Joy Fowler's first novel, Sarah Canary, is a marvel, an amazing, original novel about aliens, of all sorts, in the 1870's American West. It is extraordinarily assured, the best first novel I've read in a long time - indeed, in my opinion, at least arguably the best SF first novel of the nineties.

It concerns a mysterious woman (?), who cannot speak any recognizable language, who appears in the Pacific Northwest late in the 19th Century. A young Chinese man, Chin Ah-Kin, must try to escort her home, wherever that is. In their travels, they encounter a variety of alienated people: an Indian, a suffragette, etc. The story is thoroughly involving, very moving, beautifully written.

_Sarah Canary_ is the tale of a mysterious woman found in the Pacific Northwest in the days of the American frontier. She is dubbed "Sarah Canary" because she has no English, and possibly no language at all: her only means of communication is a peculiar warbling song which does not seem to mean anything at all: and thus, people who encounter her interpret it through their own experience and filters.

In SARAH CANARY, Karen Joy Fowler takes the reader on a haunting journey through a long-forgotten time and place, where Chinamen are almost as alien as women who cannot speak, where spiritualists have the power to command huge audiences and change lives. Yet, it is a time and place with repercussions for our time and place, and the book resonates with contemporary readers.

The mood and feel of SARAH CANARY stays with you for a very long time after you've put the book down: you may find that you want to go back and revisit it at a later date.

I thought this was a wonderful book and enjoyed it hugely. I gave 4 stars rather than 5 because I was a little let down over the last few pages ... it seemed a hasty wrap-up to an otherwise creative and compelling tale. Overall-- I laughed out loud, re-read certain passages over and over and will be quoting them to friends and family, felt the tension around Chin as an outcast minority in constant peril, loved B.J. the innocent madman.

I can't agree with some reviewers that Sarah Canary isn't developed as a character-- I think Fowler's portrayal of her as a maddening, incoherent and difficult being is quite consistent up through the end of the book.

Also I liked the historical facts and events described between chapters. I thought these sections, beyond giving the story its crazy context, were written with great (very dry) humor.

-- and I may like it the best. Karen Joy Fowler is, by far and away, My Favorite Stylist. It's that demure sense of humor that gets under my skin like a fine-edged scalpel. It's that ability to assemble seemingly random tidbits to form a thematic whole (fans of _Wisconsin Death Trip_ will understand the pleasure in this. Fowler does it best, I think, in her short story, "The Elizabeth Complex"). None of her characters are saints, none villains, but they are all human, all the time, and Fowler portrays them with honesty, empathy, and above all, humor.

(On a purely personal note, I'm a native of Washington state, and I found it great fun running into all the familiar place-names, especially Squak, my hometown -- known, these days, as Issaquah.)

Sarah Canary is the most dazzling first contact book I have ever read (and one of the few science fiction books that the non-sf readers I've given it to have not only read but loved!) Witty, compassionate, enthralling - a book that makes you think and enjoy doing it! Set in the USA in the late 1800s a mysterious woman appear out of nowhere. Is she a ghost, a madwoman, an alien? Read it and find out (maybe). Fowler is one of the best American writers of the late twentieth century even her shopping lists are a work of art.

Sarah Canary.

Is a difficult book to categorize.

After all, it's all over the place, reminds me of the film "Dead Man" by Jarmusch, a long metaphysical walk through the Northwest woods. Or, as the author admits as an influence, "The Wizard of Oz," where earnest characters grapple with a land full of surrealist pratfalls like flying monkeys and intoxicating flowers.

An ugly, babbling woman-Sara Canary-is the centerpiece of the book. You can't really call her a character, because she has absolutely no human characteristics outside of her physical appearance. Call her a symbol instead. A blank symbol filled by the perception of the characters she does encounter in 1873 Washington: a Chinese railroad worker, a woman's suffragist, a lunatic, a frontier postmaster, and a travelling carnie. Sara Canary falls into the care of each at one time or another, and they chase her across Washington to fulfill their imagined or manufactured obligations to their Sara Canary constructs. (The author herself implied that Sara Canary is an alien improperly built to infiltrate Earth.)

At times the book bogs down in annoying viewpoints. (I was not crazy, for example, with the suffragist's point of view.) Sarah Canary herself can be annoying, because you want to pin an identity on her, you need to know who she is. And you will never know. And you know it.

The author also tries to be cute sometimes by cleverly adding anachronistic references to the present into 1873 thoughts. (The worst of which occurs when the lunatic recovers his doctor's watch from Sarah Canary's throat. He notices it's still in working condition and idly wonders-referring obviously to Timex commercials-if he should test the watch in other damaging ways, dragging it behind a boat, pounding on it with a hammer, etc.)

But get beyond that. Each character receives a unique voice from the author, and the language is compelling. It's interesting and refreshing and a good, fast read. I recommend it. Go for it.

This is one of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years. It has a remarkable sense of place and person, very vivid, very sharp. So many fabulous bits! Interestingly, the novel's "realism" varies as the viewpoint gets farther and closer to the central character, Sarah Canary. Sarah Canary herself resists "objective" interpretation: we as readers, and the other characters in the book, share the experience of making of Sarah what we happen to project on her. Which is, in some sense, precisely what the book is "about", though the experience of reading it is a whole lot more than that.

I would recommend this book to people who enjoy literate science fiction, "slipstream" fiction, magic realism, and/or well-crafted prose. I would not recommend it to people who pick up their reading material at the grocery-store checkout line, who need everything explained, or who read to revisit one or another formulaic experience. Sara! h Canary is a unique, and uniquely delightful, read. Highly recommended to those who appreciate such things.

This is an excellent book. I don't think I've read anything quite like it. A mysterious woman wanders into an encampment of Chinese workers in the 19th-century West. The men there are worried, both for her--she won't speak and clearly needs help--and for themselves, because they could get in a lot of trouble if a white woman is found in their camp.

One of the men is assigned to follow Sarah Canary--an arbitrary name, since she won't tell anyone who she is--and get her back to civilization, or at least safely away from them. In the course of their wanderings, he and Sarah visit a hospital and a hotel, and her reluctant guide has to protect her, and himself, from men who consider a crazy woman and a Chinese man to be easy victims. Fowler shows us a different side of the Old West, one of the parts that doesn't involve wagon trains, gold prospectors, and cowboys.

Its a story about a Chinese man named Chin Ah Kin who works in a Labor camp in the 1870s and a mysterious woman wanders into the Chinese labor camp and they befriend each other. She mysteriously disappears befriending people on the way. This is a wonderfully written story about cultural differences and this woman is mistaken for someone else. She doesnt talk but she sings like a canary so shes named Sarah Canary. I really liked this book and it's a very moving, great story. You really feel sorry for the poor woman.