In the just-release March issue of Quill & Quire, Emily M. Keeler offers a solid review of Anakana Schofield's Malarky. Launching next month, we expect to get copies into our hands here at the Bibliomanse at some point next week. Here's a bit of the review:
Irish-Canadian literary critic Anakana Schofield¹s first novel is a tumultuous ride. Malarky asks questions without providing answers, chronicling the emotional, mental, and occasionally menial anxieties of Our Woman as she struggles with her own agency and desire. Set in contemporary Ireland, the book overflows with subtle and sometimes subversive allusions to James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d¹Urbervilles, site-specific contemporary Irish art, and Catholic history. Yet Schofield's strong prose style and inventive approach to structure will likely reward readers unfamiliar with these cultural references.
...
Schofield¹s formal experimentation is in perfect tandem with her thematic content. ... Our Woman oscillates between trying to please the men in her life -- her withdrawn husband, tellingly referred to as Himself, and her adoring gay son, Jimmy -- and trying to discern how to achieve her own empowered pleasure. She becomes obsessed with sex as a path to such empowerment, and takes a young lover after discovering her husband¹s infidelity and the bodily joy Jimmy finds with other young men.
For the rest of the review, please pick up a copy of the current Q&Q. Or better yet: pick up a copy of Malarky. It'll be available everywhere very, very soon.
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