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Bottom of the pile
13
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
9/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Jana Larson
Publisher:
Coffee House Press
Date:
January 19, 2021
Equal parts memoir, mystery, reclaimed screenplay, and travelogue, Reel Bay charts Jana Larson's unusual journey toward understanding another woman's life.
What The Reviewers Say
Throughout the book, the author refers to herself in the second and third-person, creating a sense of a semi-fictional world within the essay. The reader finds herself not just following along on Larson’s journey to understand Takako but also imagining possible pasts for the woman at the center of the mystery.
Fittingly, Larson softens the divisions separating genres by interweaving memoir, travelogue and screenplay. While unconventional, it works, and the result is a cleverly aberrant narrative structure dealing with the creative process and the difficult search for meaning.
A captivating blend of memoir, true-crime, meditation on women in film, and fantasy played out through the pages of screenplays that will never be completed.
If the book, like Larson’s journey through Takako’s story, occasionally diverges or becomes difficult to follow, and offers few concrete answers, it seems that that is part of the point..
