Reviewing a Review: Amber Sparks at Vouched

Every Friday, my plan is to reach out into the small press community and highlight writers/readers/bloggers who are writing about Cut Through the Bone. Because I want to be honest here, I'll admit that there is some cross promotion between my internet tendencies with today's post, since I'm reviewing a review of Cut Through the Bone by Amber Sparks over at Vouched, my other baby.

In my intro/launch post this past Wednesday, I mentioned briefly how Rohan doesn't just leave her readers with loss in her stories, but allows readers a space to grow in the absence of what was lost. And what I loved about Spark's review was how she focused on that aspect of these stories:

"I feel that many of the reviews I’ve read of Ethel’s book have focused mostly on the loss. With good reason: the characters that walk through these pages are all missing something, whether it is a leg or breasts or a child or love. They have all suffered a great and scarring rending away of some kind. Yet to me, the real wonder, the bright discovery made within these stories was not so much the losses sustained, but what was gained with some uneasy grace, after the initial shock."

One of the aspects of Cut Through the Bone I love so much is how Rohan doesn't provide her readers with some epiphany brought about from the loss in these stories, but allows us to find it for ourselves, or perhaps in ourselves. I've always been wary of stories that try to wrap these themes up so neat and tidy with some, "All of a sudden, s/he realized," sort of moment, because anyone who's dealt with loss, whether the loss of a pet or the loss of a close friend/relative/loved one, knows it just doesn't work like that.

Dealing with the grief of loss takes work, dammit, and that's what Rohan lets us do: work. She doesn't patronize or coddle us. She trusts us to have the strength and courage necessary to make our own bright discoveries.

I strongly believe how you respond to Cut Through the Bone will reflect how you respond to loss in your own life. If you read these stories and respond with the simple, classic classroom question, "Why is everything we read in this class so sad?" then I'll be frank with you: you're either ill-equipped to deal or inexperienced in dealing with grief and loss.

Sure, loss is sad, but it doesn't end there unless you let it. And of course some people give way to that, and a collection of stories centered around this theme wouldn't be complete without recognizing that, which Rohan does, as Amber writes:

"This description may be too pat, may make it seem as though this was one of those books, where the women are strong and the men are weak, where the women are good and the men are all assholes. Not so. Ethel is far more of a complex, nuanced writer than that. True, her men are more often than not in need of help, morally weak, or just the less able of the partnership; but there is not too much bitterness in the extra help the women lend. Instead this seemed to me a deep understanding Ethel has of the weight and balance of love, and the special kind of strength women have always had to possess. Sometimes, too, the women are fragile, are weak, break under their burdens. In “Lifelike,” and in “Make Over,” the women collapse into their own fantasy worlds, unable to cope with life as it is."

I don't remember much about the week after my mother died. I didn't shave and I slept little, but I only know that from a picture my uncle took after the funeral, a tired sag in the skin around my eyes and my face buried beneath a brush of stubble.

My body moved apart from me. There were things necessary to be done, and my brother and I moved about doing them. I let my girlfriend empathize, let myself cry against her chest, because I knew how she needed to be needed. I let people hug me, give me their condolences. I didn't argue when people told me Mom was in a better place, that I'd see her again. They needed that.

What I needed was a book like Cut Through the Bone, a book that would show me how to respond with grace to what had been so unexpectedly amputated from my life, and wouldn't try to tell me how it would be all right, wouldn't try to sell me on an epiphany or a grand scheme of things. I needed a friend who trusted that the turmoil beneath my skin could be contained there, who didn't start every conversation with, "How you holdin' up?" as though I was some sort of staggering Atlas, who gave me stories other than my own for awhile, stories that made me work a little to find the hope and joy in them. If this sounds like the story of a life, okay.