Customer Reviews

And She Was: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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 The story has a timeless quality probably because of the isolated locale and the historical references.

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.

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.

This is not a beach book. It is a book to read late at night under a warm quilt with a glass of brandy on the table. The story of Brandy (a girl, not the drink) will keep you up reading all night and phoning in sick to finish it. She is a woman that everyone knows; trashy, drifting, and slipping into middle age without anything to live for. Dyson takes her to the end of the earth (Dutch Harbor Alaska), to a feirce and proud people, and to their dark history in order to set her free. In the process she learns that in the world of heros and monsters the one who will not choose is perhaps the most dangerous, and that nothing is more important than living with intent. At times chilling, at times hillarious, this is a great story by a fierce new story teller. Buy two

After reading And She Was, by Cindy Dyson I realize I havn't read a book that made my blood boil like this in a long time. As a Unangan woman living and raising my family in Unalaska I can honestly say that the Unalaska portrayed by Ms. Dyson is nothing compared to the real place. Ms. Dyson has done a huge disservice to every Unanagan woman ever to walk the face of this earth by perpetuating age old stigmas that every native woman is a bloodthirsty, drunk "cokewhore" who likes getting her butt kicked by her abusive husband. Her hisory of the island is erroneous, speculative and force fed to her by people who have for years taken advantage of the Unangan people and our lands for thier personal glory. Thank you Cindy, for setting us back a few decades, if not a few centuries, for stripping us, yet again, of our autonimous pride and our self respect.
I would expect this kind of fiction from someone who never ventured to this island. But coming from someone who actually lived here for a very short period you would think she would have had a little more respect for the people she is capitolizing off of. But if she never stumbled forth from her booze soaked bar-world what can we expect?
This book is a load of garbage. This book makes me weep for every strong sober native woman who reads its pages and see herself in the refelection Dyson has created for her. There isn't a single female Unangan charater in the book that can be seen in a positive light. Our women are leaders, artists, authors, strong, beautiful and free. Dyson is a dried up drunk wishing she had a grasp on the reality she so blatently missed when she was here. I guess when all you do is drink at the Elbow room for two months in Dutch Harbor all you know is drunk. She never saw the real face of this beautiful island and she never met the real people who have lived here for thousands of years.
If you bought this book you wasted your money.

I won't recap the plot here since others have done that, but I'll just add that this is the kind of book that keeps me coming back for more. The character, Brandy still lives on in my head months later. If you like reading about adventure, history and mystery and especially about other women's lives, you'll like this book. Well done! Keep writing please, Cindy!

This book is the story of Brandy, a 31-year old European-American woman who lives a life of aimless drunkenness and partying and, after moving to the Aleutian islands, finds herself enmeshed in dark secrets long-kept by several Aleut women.

In theory, Brandy is a difficult character to like, what with her persistent physical and emotional self-sabotage via cocaine, marijuana, nicotine, alcohol, sex with strangers, and unhealthy relationships with parents and boyfriends. But Dyson does a fair job of getting us to, if not "like" the protagonist, (not necessary for enjoying a novel in my opinion), at least getting us into her head and understanding her perspective. Still, I think Dyson is unduly concerned with readers' opinions of Brandy, which leads her to insert all of the Roman history, pseudo-philosophical commentary on the nature of natural blondes, etc. Perhaps Dyson's goal was to convince us that Brandy is not, as her behavior and upbringing may have us believe, the proverbial "white-trash" dumb blonde.

However, the book is largely enjoyably written, despite its *many* (in my view, too many) drug and alcohol and bar scenes. Yeah, the 80's were one long coke session, and small fishing towns in Alaska are rough-and-tumble places, and Brandy's a real "drifer"--we get it.

In regards to her treatment of contemporary Aleut women, she did, as one reviewer complained, make them appear to be drunks and "coke-whores" with abusive men in their lives. However, she all of her Euro-American female characters seem like drunk coke-whores as well, from Brandy herself (although she is arguably more "humanized" than the other characters) to her jaded mother to the fake blondes from the Hi-Tide. Perhaps her point was that the 80s drug culture combined with a rural town on the edge of Alaska/America breeds drug abuse; in any case, I find it hard to believe that in 2007, a homeless woman regardless of looks could "drift" into Unalaska and within minutes of arrival start bonding with locals--Native and Euro alike--over lines of coke.

Having said this, however, I am not entirely convinced she handled the Aleut-secret storyline in the most effective fashion. I understand a writer's attraction to "moral ambiguity" and "complexity" over black-and-white characters, but the Aleut female characters were truly saddled with some of the most unsympathetic characterization I've seen in a recent novel. How are readers NOT to be turned off by their actions and reactions, even given supposedly "community-minded" or "greater-good" motivations?

It is indeed telling that--

****SPOILER ALERT********
--while the Aleut women are allowed to connive and participate in acts deemed atrocious by any society's standard, the author never takes Brandy, the (Euro-American) protagonist, to this point; Brandy's only act of "power" is getting another man to beat up an unsympathetic rapist. She, unlike every Aleut female character, is never saddled with calculated, pre-meditated murder. And indeed, although cannibalism of the dead is not a particularly offensive act (compared to murder), Brandy doesn't even eat of the Dead-Man's fat; she only visits the cave and collects some for her pretty turquoise vial.
*****SPOILER OVER*******************

Now, Dyson's decision to keep Brandy "untainted" of these acts--even while the Aleut women are immersed in them--may be a function of Brandy's sacred role as the protag, and not motivated by her ethnicity. Still, even recognizing that, the reader is given to understand that the criminal and socially unacceptable acts (no, they are not acceptable to contemporary Aleut society, either) referenced above are solely the domain of the Native characters, while Euro-American Brandy, the Hi-Tide girls, and other "Whites" remain untainted in the reader's mind.

Despite the over-reliance on stock White Trash and Drunk Native scenarios, and the problematic Aleut-secret storyline, however, this is an out-of-the-ordinary story that is, for the most part, solidly written and enjoyable.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this book - I'd heard it was good, but it just didn't sound like it would draw me in. Once I started it though, I found it very difficult to put down. Brandy's character reminded me in many ways of my younger self. The chapters that travel back in time to tell the stories of the Aleut women were really interesting - this is a place and people I was totally unfamiliar with before. Brandy's descriptions of the Aleuts' intense connection with their home of fire and water, on the edge of the world made me want to experience that too. I really liked the thread of women gaining strength and independence living in this difficult land.

This book was fascinating on so many levels. The setting of the Aleutian Islands is very unique and the place is like a character in and of itself. Very atmospheric. The story of the Aleutian women was also fascinating. One part history of a place, and one part anthropoligical study of a people. The way the author interweaves this with Brandy's story is just brilliant. I was hooked from page one and couldn't wait to finish the story to see how everything turned out, but then when it was over I didn't want it to end. This is definitely a book I will never forget. One of those books that gets under your skin and you just want it to stay there.

This book was not an easy read for me. The author painted a picture of a group of people where any drug of choice was okay. There is never a sense that the drugs or the party life are harmful but instead she paints a world where everyone is satisfying their most base desires no matter the consequences.
I doubt the Aleutian people appreciated the representation of themselves in this book. The basic plot was good but Ms Dyson failed to make me love or identify with any character. When I finished it I felt I had wasted my time and promptly threw it in the trash can.