Eleventh Blog Anniversary (& International Women’s Day)

Bookish Beck launched 11 years ago today. I find that hard to believe as I still feel like a newbie in the blogging world compared to veterans like Annabel, Kim, Laura, Liz and Simon; imposter syndrome (Imposter Foster!) strikes again. And yet I can’t really remember what it was like before I had a blog, nor can I imagine life without one.

Pratyya Ghosh, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This is my 1594th post, which means I’m maintaining an average of 2.8 posts per week. I feel like I’m posting less often these days, with most of my reviews clumping around the end of a month as I scramble to report back on library reads and finish everything I’ve started towards particular challenges.

It’s also International Women’s Day, a coincidence I would have been unaware of when I started the blog. The Women’s Prize longlist is always announced at around this time of year, with the Carol Shields Prize longlist to follow on Tuesday. I’ve read three of the Women’s Prize nominees (Castillo, Hutchinson and King) and skimmed another (Choi). I’m currently reading Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors, which is also just right for Reading Ireland Month.

To mark the day, I’ll reproduce my review of one of the best books I’ve read by a woman recently. It’s one of my early favourites for the year.

Brawler by Lauren Groff

The nine short stories in Lauren Groff’s exceptional eighth book profile women in states of desperation and probe legacies of loss and violence.

Most of the stories employ third-person narration and originally appeared in the New Yorker. Often, inherited trauma binds mothers and daughters. The title character is high school swimmer Sara, who shoplifts and fights in frustration at her mother’s incurable illness. In “Under the Wave,” set after a natural disaster, a woman adopts an orphan as a replacement for her dead child—despite their racial differences. The title of “The Wind” symbolizes women’s fear and rage after an attempted escape from an abusive patriarch. Accidental harm and imagery of the Madonna and Child link the three mother–daughter pairs in “Annunciation.”

Themes of midlife reinvention and latent queerness (cf. Matrix) recur. Bisexuality is a secret between a dying woman and her friend in “Birdie.” In “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” a woman finds new hobbies following early retirement. Although she flirts with her female gardening teacher, she realizes her desire is not to leave her husband but to “brush up against the dazzling future again.”

“Such Small Islands” is a startling Jamesian fable; “To Sunland” a 1950s Southern gothic black comedy that would do Flannery O’Connor proud; and the masterful “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” a suspenseful, novella-length examination of privilege and obsession.

The prose is stellar and the endings breathtaking. Groff is a first-rate novelist, but her short stories are truly peerless.

(Reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)

Thanks to all who support my blog by reading and commenting. You’re stars!