they shouldn’t be. Chancy offers fleeting redemption for some characters, but she does not deal in false hopes. “We all look away unless it’s us, or someone we love, going up in flames,” one character muses. In this devastating work, Chancy refuses to let any of us look away. A devastating, personal, and vital account.
KEEPING THE HOUSE
Cin, Tice And Other Stories (216 pp.) $17.95 paper | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-91350-508-0
Three generations of Turkish Cypriots navigate British culture while profiting off the London underworld. This is nominally a story about crime and punishment among immigrants in London’s multicultural Tottenham
★ “Once again, Brown shows his mastery of the
graphic format for portraying humanity in the most trying of circumstances.”—Horn Book, starred review
neighborhood, but interdisciplinary artist Cin throws in everything but the kitchen sink in terms of language, story, and structure. At the book’s center is Damla, born in 1991; the narrative encompasses her adolescence and early adulthood, but it’s more a story about the sacrifices people make to protect their families and themselves. In addition to Damla and her siblings, ipek and Erhan, the book spends a lot of time flashing back to the origins of their mother, Ayla, and their grandmother Makbule as well as a host of friends, lovers, criminals, and partners in crime. There’s a plot in here somewhere, something to do with Ayla’s scheme to smuggle heroin into the country disguised in cabbages, of all things, but there’s no consistency to the story. There is, however, some remarkable writing as well as keen characterizations of Damla’s companions, none of whom are painted in black and white. The book’s greatest strength is its intense observational scrutiny, whether of the ubiquitous doldrums of work or the acute differences in the ways Damla and the people around her, notably her mother and grandmother, experience the world. The fragmented structure makes it read almost like a scrapbook; real deliberation is required in order to unearth the primary story and numerous subplots among scatterings of poetry and abrupt shifts in point of view. It’s clear there’s a method to the madness, though, as Cin writes, “Being the heroine of your own love story starts with a belief in magnetism, pulling the right corresponding elements towards you and somehow sifting out the debris.” An anarchic, experimental debut a bit too novel for its own good.
I WISHED
Cooper, Dennis Soho (136 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-1-641-29304-4 An elegy for a friend, lover, and muse that resists conventions of storytelling and expands the possibilities of the novel form with daring and vulnerability. With his five-part George Miles cycle—beginning with Closer (1989)— Cooper made his name as a Sadean enfant terrible, never shying away from depicting graphic scenes of sex and violence while capturing readers with hypnotic narrative authority. This group of novels, we learn in the opening pages of his latest, was not only an homage to his beloved friend—whose suicide at 30 the writer did not learn about until a decade later—but his only way of articulating a pain “that talking openly can’t handle.” Less narrative than prismatic, this book explores imagined landscapes, George’s childhood, and the depths of Cooper’s own psyche to ask: How does the artist alchemize his grief into a work that is legible and worthy of attention? In the first major section, a narrator explores George’s traumatic upbringing by a sexually abusive father and his mental health as he transitions into adulthood while living with untreated bipolar disorder. Here, Cooper refers to himself in the third person, too, as if to examine the
“A succinct and impactful look at one of America’s worst tragedies, skillfully rendered by one of comics journalism’s best.”—School Library Journal More from award-winning author Don Brown
10
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1 august 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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