The Albino Album

by Chavisa Woods

Emerging author Chavisa Woods has been noted for capturing a "strange, troubling vision of domestic life in the rural U.S." (Go Magazine). Here she presents a techno-colored vision of rural adolescence, the story of a girl with an unpronounceable name—a fiery, unhinged, growling, big-hearted country girl in a dirty black tutu and combat boots who travels along all the bizarre yet familiar byways of human desire from the cornfields of Louisiana and the big brass sound of Mardi Gras to the heights of the Empire State Building. Turning the tradition of the southern gothic novel on its head, Woods presents a new land of contemporary misfits including fire-dancers, pseudo-Nazis who breed albino animals, catholic workers, horse thieves, and the archangel Gabrielle.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Young Adult, Lesbian, Queer Lit, Southern Gothic

561 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Chavisa Woods is the author of three books of fiction, Things to Do when You’re Goth in the Country, The Albino Album, (both released by Seven Stories Press), and Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind (Fly by Night Press/ Autonomedia/ Unbearables).

Woods was the recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award, The Kathy Acker Award in Writing, the Cobalt Fiction Prize, and the Jerome Foundation Award for Emerging Writers. She was also a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, The Evergreen Review, New York Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Full Stop Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, Quaint, and many others.

Woods has performed and appeared as a featured author at such notable venues as The Whitney Museum of American Art, City Lights Bookstore, Town Hall Seattle, The Brecht Forum, The Cervantes Institute, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and others.

"This Book is tight, intelligent, and important, and sure to secure Woods a seat in the pantheon of critical twenty-first-century voices." — Booklist



"Think of Woods as a literary exorcist, calling out certain entities that possess rural America: isolation, working-class poverty, drugs, incarceration, military dogma, and evangelical religion." — The Rumpus


"You can say that these stories seem like they were ready made for a post 2017 election but they were written during the Obama presidency; the experience of America that many people have woken up to in the last six months is the America that has been happening since the beginning of this country. Chavisa Woods writes with vision and experience from “this moment between” delivering us into the world that’s always been here.” — Electric Lit

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's a gal to do after she accidentally feeds her mother to an albino tiger?

Well, the girl with the unpronounceable name, the heroine of this hefty kitten-squisher, will subsequently bumble through life depending on the kindness of strangers. Everyone will inexplicably and instantly fall in love with (or at least want to have sex with) this wretched, unwashed, motherless ragamuffin...even after she loses her hair in a bizarre juggling accident.

Love at first sight? A powerless, uneducated waif who goes along with whoever needs her? I honestly should have hated this book, and yet...I didn't.

@#$%'s exploits were so involving, so intriguing, so far-fetched (I repeat - bizarre juggling accident!), that I couldn't stop turning the pages.

Though I was somewhat annoyed by the ending - Once again, she depends on someone else to rescue her; this time it is literally a "knight" riding a white horse. Yeah. Right. - this was still a riveting, soap-opera of a read.

[Faith Reidenbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This astonishing novel is pretty darn close to being the Great American Lesbian Novel I've been awaiting for 35 years. The central theme is racial in/justice, and other types of oppression are explored; the largest part of it is set among working-class people in the heartland, and an immigrant is one of the main characters; lesbians are central to the story, and other queer people are featured.

The book jacket says Woods works "in the tradition of the southern gothic." But there’s not too much South here, aside from a long interlude in New Orleans. Think southern gothic as in Carson McCullers: all the characters are eccentric (most are downright "freaks"); the comedy is tragic and the tragedy is comic; politics bubbles under the surface. (I hadn't grasped how evil the Monsanto Company is until I read this book.)

What makes the novel a notch less than Great is that it doesn't completely hang together. After I finished it, I read in an interview with Woods that she wrote the first and last chapters as short stories; she wrote the intervening material to connect them. That showed.

If you want to understand how brilliant Woods is, the political connections she can help you make, and what we have to look forward to in her future books, you can read an interview with her at http://www.lambdaliterary.org/feature...

I’m going to have to talk fast to my lesbian book group to convince them to discuss this with me. At $20 and 550 pages, the book is a stretch for us. [Later: The group did agree and thought the book well worth the time and money.] But I tell you, if this novel doesn’t win the Lammy in its category, I will wash my hands of those awards for good. [Later: It didn't and I did.]

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the fact that this book confused me fairly often and occasionally annoyed me, in the end I think I love it? I'm pretty certain it's a work of genius, somewhere in between Moby Dick and I've Got A Time Bomb by Sybil Lamb. It's a truly epic, truly bizarre queer coming of age story for the 21st century.

It tackles sexuality, race, class, leftist/lesbian/punk politics, and other issues in a way I've never seen before, like an anthropologist with the keen eye of an observer but the familiar feeling of an insider. Woods's insight into the more general human condition --"When you have nothing, the sunlight, carrying with it the promise of a new day, makes a mockery of light" -- and into the specificities of all sorts of populations (the aforementioned political groups but also working class rural white folks and middle class artsy non-profit workers) is incredibly nuanced and startlingly accurate.

A must read, and the kind of book you could read three or four times and get more out of it every time.

[Brett Axel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm hesitant to use labels like Southern, Poverty, Punk, Lesbian, or Anarchist, because while this book is all of these, they are not treated as gimmick or novelty. Chavisa has lived in these worlds with the keen observation of a cultural anthropologist and has the writing skill to bring it to life for a reader. I put this book on the same list with Tom Robbins, Chuck Palahniuk, and Irvine Welsh. Right now I am reading it for the second time, more slowly, to savor every phrase.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tried to describe what was happening at the end to some straights and realized the hero was riding a white horse into the city to save the heroine. Luckily it's a cliffhanger, the heroine is a homeless terrorist who thinks she's a tiger, and the hero is an intersex Malian activist, and the horse was bred by Nazis
Basically this book is amazing.

[MerryMeerkat · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG this book is so freaking amazing. I took a lot of notes and still don't even know where to begin. It is incredibly intense, its very stream of conciousness. I haven't been this excited about a new book since I discovered Haruki Murakami.This book is so hard to describe. But basically its about a young girl who becomes a domestic terrorist. At first you think the book is about China and Panama (characters, not the countries) but they are really just background characters. Then you find out the book is about a girl with an impronounceable name (though eventually she has a nickname of Mya and she is actually the daughter of Panama. Mya at some point somehow feeds her mom to an albino tiger and becomes horribly traumatized by it. The book has so many twists and turns, just when you think you think you know where it's going, it changes. Side One Or part one (as the book is set up like an album) is much more hectic and confused. By the time side two or part two comes around, things are a bit more settled,There are some intense girl girl sex scenes, but if you aren't into that it might bother you but I loved it. I don't think I'm going to say much more because I don’t want to ruin the book for anyone. In anycase, read it, its fantastic.

[Kari Barclay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my lord. This is the anti-Hillbilly Elegy I needed in my life: a queer epic winding its way from the rural Midwest to New Orleans to New York City, skewering Monsanto, unflinchingly confronting middle American racism, and having some badass and moving lesbian, queer, and intersex intimacies. Okay, that's the concept. Execution-wise, the language is gorgeous, but the novel suffers from some meandering and a dissatisfying ending. I could live with that. It's vital and chimerical and explosive like the world it depicts.

[Sarah Swedberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Or maybe 3-1/2 stars...

Through much of this book, I was awestruck. It really is a queer epic (one of the ways it is described on the back cover), with one of the most interesting main characters ever. Woods imagines the most marginal of marginal people and gives her breath and words and sounds and smells.

While much of the book rang true, other parts struck a false chord. It was brilliant, but in places it fell a little flat. Woods tried to cover too much territory.

[Jonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I have read all year. This is the greatest queer novel I have read period(to be fair I have not read many). This is the novel I didn’t know I was missing, and I am so glad I found it.

Upon finishing “Things to do when you’re goth in the country” i was left with an unshakable feeling that I had just stumbled across something special. Although that collection was not perfect, i found Chavisa’s writing to be electric. When researching something else by Woods to read and I came across this review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Claiming “the albino Album” to be darn close to the great lesbian American novel, you could consider me impressed. That praise l was enough to hook me, and hooked I was.

[Erica Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

My father couldn't wait for me to read this one. He bought it on a trip to Thailand and made sure he could give it to me before my mother. He told me how much the author packed into every paragraph and he certainly wasn't wrong. At 550 incredibly dense pages, this was an extensive read. As I started to read it, dad was eager for my feedback and I told him it was a wild book for a dad to give his daughter, given the underage sex work, endless Lesbian sex, etc. After my dad passed it sat on my shelf for months but I told myself I'd finish it before the end of the year, 13 months after starting. It clearly needed another edit, at minimum for typos as are there are many, and also for length and probably that disappointing ending. Regardless, I clearly won't forget about this one.

[Emily]

I liked it, but I feel like I could have used a book club or discussion group - there were a lot of things going on and a lot of socially and morally complicated characters to think about and keep track of, and I'm not quite sure if I was supposed to read it at face value or if there was symbolism that I missed. I felt sympathetic towards the nameless protagonist, as well as Idrissa and Gabriel - I could have read more things from either of their perspectives.

[Martha Mims · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very interesting and entertaining. I found myself a little confused in a couple places about who the narrator was, with the story jumping around in time and among characters, but got the gist of it anyway. It is a window into a very American world, the one that exists between the coasts, told with both courage and love.

[Lan Carver · Rating 3 out of 5]

some good chapters. overall meh.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still thinking about this one.. It was just so good. It was very meandering and stream of conscious, but in a compelling way. More atmospheric than a page turner, but at the same time so bizarre that I kept wanting to come back to it to see what crazy shit would happen next. I absolutely loved all the characters- they were pretty cartoonish and out there, and yet very real and sympathetic (I absolutely love when authors can pull that off). And they were all so beautifully wonderfully queer in different ways. I honestly just wanted this book to go on and on. Definitely will re-read it at some point.

[Mersini · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't even know where to begin with this book. I feel like so much happened and I'm still dizzy; my thoughts are trying to catch up with my feelings. Basically, this book is amazing. You have a queer main character with an unpronounceable name, who sometimes goes by Mya, a non-binary character of colour who's an activist, at least one other queer character of colour, whose particular brand of activism sometimes spills into the territory of terrorism, men with southern drawls who horse nap in their spare time, and a kid who thinks he's an angel - essentially, the kind of people who rarely get to see the light of day in fiction. And it's wonderful. I had no idea I needed this book in my life till I was reading it, and I'm pretty sure any book I read from now on will not be complex enough, queer enough, or culturally diverse enough.

I feel like the plot is the least important aspect of this novel; it mostly follows Mya, either from her perspective or of those she is in contact with, as she travels and interacts with different people. What's important isn't the story, but the people - who they are, how they react, what they do and what they know and what they believe in. At the core, this novel is almost a religious text; it has obvious references to religion, like Christianity, but this isn't what I mean. I mean that this book is about belief and faith and standing for those things. It is no accident that two of the characters are activists, nor that another runs a church-like institute. Nor is it a mistake that politics and faith are so closely aligned. Mya, constantly surrounded by people who believe things, who want things, is an unaligned point of chaos who hikes from place to place, shaped by each encounter. But she always leaves before she feels that she is compromised. Chavisa Woods explores what it is to be moulded by those around us, by love, and by our own actions. It is a tale of morality, while pointing out that morality, while black and white in one person's eyes, can be grey in the view of another.

This is all upheld by Woods' incredible writing. One moment you have Mya struggling with the thought of being confined or being ashamed of, and the next you have a political discussion slipped in so well that you barely notice the transition. One thing I loved was that although Mya is traditionally uneducated, Woods' own education is not invisible, with references to Marx, Lucy Irigary and Jeanette Winterson, making for a clever landscape from which Mya gleans information about an array of subjects.

It's perhaps not the easiest book to read, sometimes being strange and almost cryptic, but in a larger sense the elements fit together, like one of the puzzles that Mya is so fond of. It is by far, one of the cleverest, well constructed, most diverse books I've ever read, and I know that I will have to reread it to fully glean its depth.

[BeetleBlack · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a little bit of a mixed bag for me. Overall, I liked it. Novels like this can suffer from being too focused on aesthetics (punk! queer! country! black tutu!!), but Chavisa Woods is very good at writing honestly, if that makes sense -- the characters are fairly complex and not necessarily always likable, but definitely feel true to life -- certainly I feel like a lot of social circles I have moved through in my life are accurately (sometimes painfully so) represented.
I got a little frustrated at all the people that encountered the main character and when confronted with her saying something racist and not understanding why it's a problem, just throwing up their hands and saying, "That's just not done!" The main character is framed as a sort of dirty-mouthed innocent in a state of rural-America-raised tabula rasa, which means the dynamic often ends up being that she causes people to question things through her ignorance, but herself seems to experience limited growth, in some respects. I suppose one could say that people being bad at communication is also true to life, but as this book captured so well, people that love us can still inadvertently hurt us, and many who have experienced racism etc. from loved ones have unfortunately had to get very good at having intense and nuanced conversations. I feel like realistically, this could have happened -- not, like, a preachy little educational moment, but an actual (generally very tense) conversation like I have seen many times in my life.
On the other hand, the narrative had a lot of great insights into human nature, and moments of very Flannery O'Connor spookiness that shaded into absurdist humor -- that was excellent. Overall, a very epic sort of book, and good at traversing those liminal spaces between subcultures. Really good portrayals of some difficult relationship dynamics. I do wish the ending was a little less abrupt.

[Adams Indy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This story could only be written by a privileged white girl with absolutely no real understanding on what she is writing about. The author attempts to address white supremacy but has clearly only seen it within her own community and addresses how it effects her, a stupid white girl. She treats racism as no more significant than different white people rooting for rival sports teams, and how deeply it hurts to be a Cowboys fan in a room full of Greenbay fans.

Albino animals are used as pretentious symbols through out the book in a cloddish, over the top but lacking substance way. The little white girl in the story is poor but written by someone who has clearly never actually been poor. She glides through life not needing money or resources and yet is never cold or hungry. the world just provides for her as it does every rich white girl.

There's even a circus scene where the author uses accidental blackface for a cheap laugh. From that point on I just kept reading to find out what other ignorant crap this author did.

It culminates, predictably, with the little white girl being a domestic terrorist bomber and, of course, the hero. Because if there's one thing we need more of in this world it is white terrorists. Without a doubt the worst book I read all the way to the end.

[Jeanne Thornton · Rating 5 out of 5]

CHAVISA IS THE BEST. I met her because I got a copy of her first book, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind, by weird circumstance, read it, reviewed it for the Fiction Circus site, and every so often we would talk and thus I learned about this book. I had the hella great privilege of reading parts of it while it was in progress. She described it as a "queer epic." IT IS. It's like straight up Moby Dick for a certain segment of modern, marginalized, left-political queer America.

Erudite and funny, wide-ranging and fearless, a story about identity and what it means to be a citizen of a corrupt nation, what it means to build a world for yourself with whatever circumstances you've got. Each chapter is thematically tied to a rock song, and major themes include albino animal breeding, whether lovers should own one another, and what the role of the political left can and ought to be. You are a fool if you pass this book up. Read it immediately. NOW.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chavisa Woods is a force to be reckoned with and I am so glad that I will have the great opportunity to hear her read March 8th at Lawn Gnome Bookstore in Phoenix. Her debut Novel is a wonderful piece of literature that you won't want to put down. It soars and beckons you to stay put and fly right alongside.

[Franciszka · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the first book i read 'for pleasure' after grad school. i couldn't put it down.
it slowed down too much for me at the beginning of section two, but i loved the world it took me to.
queer. political. story. brilliant characters.

[Meghan]

Just received this today. Excited to start it as soon as I finish up my current book.

[Joey Diamond]

Do I want to read this queer epic magical realism book? I thought so til I saw it compared to Irvine welch and chuck palahniuk....

[JayElAitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite book. It repeatedly broke my heart and put it back together again.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting book.
I really enjoyed reading it.