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80
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
80/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Jeannine Ouellette
Publisher:
Split/Lip Press
Date:
January 4, 2021
Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfatherâs groping and her motherâs erratic behavior, Ouellette lives for the day she can become a mother herself and create her own sheltering family.
What The Reviewers Say
In the exploration of the abuse, it has echoes of the memoirs of Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, and Tara Westover.
... calm, engaging and affecting without being devastating. The details of her abuse at a very young age by her stepfather are treated with a reasonable amount of delicacy, and like the cult classic The Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch, which has a similar subject, the memoir is beautifully written and interestingly constructed.
A key characteristic of Ouellette’s writing is her preoccupation with nature, as she calmly skips between accounts of her past and factual information about the natural world...On occasion, these observations serve as distractions from personal pain; in other instances, they mirror the author’s emotional state...The memoir also eloquently describes how the effects of abuse resonate into adulthood...The presentation of the author’s life story as a series of fragments may strike some readers as idiosyncratic; however, this structure poignantly reflects a self-described 'brokenness'.
