5 minute read
CALL US WHAT WE CARRY by Amanda Gorman
professor of psychology at VMU and a sometime FBI consultant to boot. Everybody involved has a different agenda they’re desperately trying to keep secret from everybody else, but the main thing that changes when the secrets come out is another burst of violence that suggests that that summer 18 years ago may not be the only time that ends up getting buried.
More smoke than fire.
SURVIVOR’S GUILT
Gigl, Robyn Kensington (352 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 25, 2022 978-1-4967-2828-9
A defense attorney takes on sex traffickers and child pornographers.
When a detective asks Erin McCabe to meet with a young woman accused of murder, he explains that he has two reasons. One is that, despite her admission of guilt, the detective thinks Ann Parsons is innocent. The second is that Ann is, like Erin, transgender. Her decision to represent Ann will end up putting Erin, her law partner, and her boyfriend in grave danger. And, as the action unfolds, she will also have to deal with her mother’s breast cancer and the knowledge that her boyfriend’s family won’t accept her. The setup is quite similar to that of Gigl’s debut, By Way of Sorrow (2021), as is the mix of legal thriller with interpersonal drama. Erin is an engaging protagonist surrounded by wellrounded secondary characters. But the emotional stakes here are less compelling, and the legal case is unsatisfying. In By Way of Sorrow, Erin was dealing with the fact that her brother and her father rejected her after she came out as trans, and she was negotiating a romance with a man who wasn’t sure he could deal with her past. Watching Erin react to her mother’s illness slows the plot of this second book without revealing anything new about the protagonist and, here, that same boyfriend is almost too good to be true. The bad guys are also implausible. The idea of powerful people exploiting children is all too believable, but there’s something ridiculous about evil geniuses whose only response to a perceived threat is to just murder everybody. The emotional realism and the cartoon violence don’t fit together. The biggest issue, though, is the amount of information—about Ann Parsons and another key character—that Gigl keeps under wraps as the narrative unfolds. The reader never sees Erin asking—or even formulating—obvious and important questions about her client. To the extent that there are big reveals, they feel artificial and insufficient.
Gigl uses her debut novel as a template, with diminishing returns.
CALL US WHAT WE CARRY Poems
Gorman, Amanda Viking (80 pp.) $19.99 | Dec. 7, 2021 978-0-593-46506-6
Poems for teenagers and adults that cast a scrutinizing eye on United States history and current events while being hopeful about the future.
Gorman’s opening poem, “Ship’s Manifest,” lays out her intentions: “This book is a message in a bottle. / This book is a letter. / This book does not let up. / This book is awake. / This book is a wake. / For what is a record but a reckoning?” Gorman delivers subtle turns of phrase alongside playful yet purposeful punning. The book tackles grief without succumbing to melancholy. It earnestly charts the challenges its collective “we” must navigate, including mask mandates and Covid-19 restrictions; social isolation; the environmental negligence of past generations; and the civil unrest following the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. A “dark girl” dreams and skillfully steers the collective “we” point of view in these poems, which marks a sea change in the United States and, subsequently, in contemporary American poetry. Mostly, the collective “we” point of view
the high house
adheres. Occasionally it reads as monotonous or prosaic. But variation exists in the diversity of concrete or visual poems— shaped on the page to look like flags, whales, buildings, and text bubbles—and the intricate range of people, generational insights, and historical footnotes populating the pages. The collection overflows with teachable moments you can imagine quoted at graduation ceremonies and special events for years to come. It’s not a book to be read in one sitting but to be savored and revisited. By the time readers are finished, they’ll have discovered Lucille Clifton, Don Mee Choi, M. NourbeSe Philip, and a dizzying host of poets and thinkers that inspired these verses. The poems don’t preen to prove their intelligence; rather, they’re illuminated by it. Gorman’s impulse to enlighten readers rather than exclude them is the book’s guiding force. With generosity and care, Gorman takes the role of the poet seriously: “The poet transcends ‘telling’ or ‘performing’ a story & / instead remembers it, touches, tastes, traps its vastness.”
An inspired anthem for the next generation—a remarkable poetry debut.
THE HIGH HOUSE
Greengrass, Jessie Scribner (320 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 4, 2022 978-1-982180-11-9
British author Greengrass’ latest is a grim and often moving hybrid, a postapocalyptic climate change novel with a doomed domestic idyll tucked inside. Francesca is a renowned climate change activist, ever more in demand as her bleak, accurate predictions earn her a reputation as a Cassandra. As the global situation deteriorates, she more and more leaves her teenage stepdaughter, Caro, in charge of her young son, Pauly, and the two half siblings develop a powerful bond. (Francesca’s husband, the children’s father, has begun traveling with her to aid her work.) Francesca is a fascinating character—highminded, laser-focused, sanctimonious, apparently allergic to joy; her neglect has a sadness in it, too, that of the parent who feels called to “higher” duty and who, it will turn out, has done the best she can in the ways that align with her skills and her inclinations. Just before she and her husband are killed in a storm on the East Coast of the U.S., Francesca tells Caro to decamp from London with Pauly to a remote bluffside home that she’s worked, unbeknownst to the kids, to make into a refuge, a well-stocked, mostly self-sustaining hidy-hole. Francesca has hired as caretakers an irascible young woman named Sal and her grandfather. Caro and Pauly arrive just in time to learn of Francesca’s and their father’s deaths, and they settle in to the high house for whatever slow and limping limbo humankind has left to it. The book’s great strength is in the way it depicts this period. There’s no large-scale hope or drama remaining; choices made long ago have wreaked their irreversible damage, and all that’s left for the four is to sustain themselves quietly, with whatever portion of peace and pleasure they can manage, for as long as possible. Greengrass excels in her
