And She Was: A Novel [Hardcover]

Cindy Dyson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2006

Sweeping across centuries and into the Aleutian Islands of Alaska's Bering Sea, And She Was begins with a decision and a broken taboo when three starving Aleut mothers decide to take their fate into their own hands. Two hundred and fifty years later, by the time Brandy, a floundering, trashy, Latin-spewing cocktail waitress, steps ashore in the 1980s, Unalaska Island has absorbed their dark secret—a secret that is both salvation and shame.

In a tense interplay between past and present, And She Was explores Aleut history, mummies, conquest, survival, and the seamy side of the 1980s in a fishing boomtown at the edge of the world, where a lost woman struggles to understand the gray shades between heroism and evil, and between freedom and bondage.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brandy "was thirty-one, the daughter of a bum and a slut, saddled with a liquor name." It's with these dubious credentials that our heroine finds herself—yet again—drifting after a man. This time she follows her latest boyfriend, Thad, a tenderhearted fisherman she keeps at emotional arm's length, to remote Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands. Brandy finds a gig as a cocktail waitress at the local roughneck bar, the Elbow Room, where brawls are the evening's entertainment and fishermen drink with Aleut women, including Bessie, a coke whore, and Little Liz, a hostile drunk. Between drinking, drugging and deciphering mysterious graffiti on the bathroom walls, Brandy delves into the past of the native Aleuts, who were brutally decimated by the Russians in the 18th century. She stumbles upon their mythology and hidden powers—Bessie and Little Liz, for example, are more than what they seem. Dyson expertly interlaces Brandy's story, set in 1986, with the vibrant history of the Aleuts, hundreds of years earlier. While relishing the smart prose, bawdy humor and '80s references, readers will find themselves rooting for the hard-as-nails blonde as she wrestles her demons and begins to redirect her fate. Dyson delivers an original and provocative first novel.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In an impressive first novel that echoes Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) and Proulx's The Shipping News (1993), the tragic conquest of a little-discussed ethnic group is filtered through an unlikely point of view. Thirty-one-year-old Brandy is a blond drifter who impulsively follows her boyfriend to a fishing port in the Aleutian Islands. Left alone during his trips at sea, she becomes obsessed with hints, from sources as unlikely as bathroom graffiti and an Aleut coke-whore, of a secret the native community would prefer remain hidden--particularly from a "very fuckin' white" cocktail waitress. The first--person narrative alternates with chapters set in catastrophic periods of Aleut history, tracing several generations of women whose grim resolve left a daunting, bloody legacy to their daughters and granddaughters: "In your hands you hold your fate, and in no one's hands but your own does your future rest." Insertions of scholarly information distract from the drama of Brandy's personal transformation, but Dyson's talent is overwhelmingly evident in her nimble balancing of tribal perspectives and those of her canny, questing protagonist. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st Printing edition (February 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060597704
• ISBN-13: 978-0060597702
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,921,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cindy Dyson is nothing like any character in her book. She wouldn't even hang with people who were anything like characters in her book. While she is blonde and did grow up in Alaska, any resemblances to her characters are just rumors started by questionable friends. Okay, she did have a few wayward years, and she did sling drinks at the notorious Elbow Room. But not for very long, and she's never eaten mummy flesh, although she has tried muktuk (whale blubber) as well as lusta (fermented seal flipper).

In fact, Cindy is a respectable member of her of community near Glacier National Park, MT. She has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and was a reporter for a few years. She wrote scads of magazine articles and several nonfiction kids' books.

Dyson is at work on her second novel.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "It is the dead that make all the difficult decisions.", September 3, 2006

By 

Snowbrocade (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: And She Was: A Novel (Hardcover)

Dyson's novel on first glance is another party chick story. But it is so much more. Brandy's mother grooms her for the life of a woman with a man. From an early age her mother teaches her the tools of a woman's arsenal, particularly the allure of blonde hair. But Brandy also loved her father who was a failed intellectual and drunk.

With these immature and conflicting role models, Brandy ends up going from man to man, drifting, never falling in love. She ends up on an island in the Aleutian chain with a fisherman. Her partying continues but another part of her longs for something more. She learns about the native Aleutians, and finds out another way that women have gained power.

Dyson layers the story of Brandy's quest to become her own woman with information about the colonization of the Aleutian islands, first by brutal Russians and then by Americans, told through the lens of the story of native women fighting back against oppression by their own and the intruding cultures.

This book is well written and the plot flows easily. Sometimes I found myself not wanting to go with the head jumping and stick with one story. Also, the book is billed as a glimpse into the 1980's but there is very little reference to 80's culture other than music. The story has a timeless quality probably because of the isolated locale and the historical references.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Whole Point of Fiction, March 27, 2006

By 

M. Lennon (west hollywood, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: And She Was: A Novel (Hardcover)

The point of good fiction is to present alternative points of view, to transport the reader into the world of another, to suspend belief, to see life through a new, and often blurred, set of eyes.

Dyson does that when she brings blonde-haired Brandy, a woman who has spent her whole life following men she's never cared about, to this remote Alaskan town at the end of the world.

It is here, against the backdrop of lost souls and mythical women that Brandy finally sees why her life has turned out the way it has and gathers the strength to change it.

Dyson in no way denigrates Alaska or the Alaskan women, rather she exposes a cross-section of life there, some good, some not so good. And she does it in poetry. I strongly recommend this book.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A strange reading experience..., May 24, 2006

By 

Cassie W. (Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: And She Was: A Novel (Hardcover)

AND SHE WAS, the adult debut of young adult novelist Cindy Dyson, tells the story of Brandy, who is "31 years old, the daughter of a bum and a slut, saddled with a liquor name." At the beginning of the novel, Brandy finds herself following yet another curly-haired man; he's a fisherman this time, and she's following him to the very edge of the world: Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Brandy takes a job as a cocktail waitress at the Elbow Room, the bar that Playboy Magazine named the roughest bar in the country. Once she's settled in to a small cabin high on a hill overlooking the Bering Sea, Thad promptly heads back out to sea, and Brandy is left to her own devices in a land of natives, where her white skin puts her in the minority.

Left alone at the end of the world, with nothing to do, Brandy turns to one of her favorite hobbies for amusement: "latrinalia," the study of bathroom grafitti. She's collected lots of good nuggets over the years, but two small words, written in a stall in the Elbow Room's bathroom, strike her as especially odd: "killing hands." Through a succession of clues (some found on bathroom walls, some not), Brandy discovers that her life is becoming intertwined with the lives of a small band of Aleut women who have kept a haunting, destructive secret for generations. Brandy begins to realize that she's changing, becoming more than just a beautiful blonde who likes to party, who severs all attachments before they become meaningful, who maintains a "pleasant elevation" and remains a bystander, watching her own life pass her by.

Dyson weaves Brandy's story, taking place in 1986, with that of a small group of Aleutian women, stretching back to 1741. Each generation of Aleutian women is forced to commit punishable acts for the betterment of their people, living by a mantra that was laid down by their mothers: "In your hands you hold your fate, and in no one's hands but your own does your future rest."

AND SHE WAS was a very strange reading experience for me. I was intrigued by the story's mysterious, ancient setting and fascinated with the history of the Unalaskan Aleuts. The history of the Aleutian people who inhabit such a small corner of the world is a violent one, full of persecution and degradation, and Dyson tells it with passion and sensitivity. So, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, this novel succeeds. I also found it intriguing that Dyson took the lyrics of a song--"And She Was," by the Talking Heads--and, in a sense, set her story to it. Each chapter's title is a fragment of lyric, and the parallels between the unnamed woman in the song and Brandy are clear.

Yet, something was missing. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much Dyson wanted me to, I just couldn't connect with the women in the story--not even Brandy. All of the characters felt flat and lifeless to me. Dyson's prose tries hard to be poignant, but it fails; rather, her writing is just muddled and hard to follow. Her description is often excessive, and the insertion of scholarly passages about ancient Rome seem glaringly out of place. And nothing really happens in the book. It's supposed to be all about Brandy's evolution as a woman, but I just didn't care enough about said evolution for the plot to retain my interest for long periods of time. AND SHE WAS just left me out in the cold emotionally; it didn't inspire me or make me feel anything at all.

I seem to be in the minority here, but I thought AND SHE WAS was just an okay book. Intriguing setting, fascinating history, unique inspiration--I just wasn't crazy about all of the pieces put together.