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Hex
The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales ) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.
Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex , the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.
Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex , the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.
356 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 12, 2016
Whatever reservations I may have about this novel, I love the language. An example:
The truth! The truth! The truth! It all depends on how you deal with it. Thingy took her nothingness and stitched it to the bottom of her foot. I took mine and sent it spinning into the forest where I pretended it perished --- eaten by a bear, felled by the forester's axe. Daniel and Jacob have made formulas of theirs, albeit very different ones, and my father pressed his to him as he would the body of a woman, reveling i the way it defined his form.
But Luke was an altogether different sort. Luke looked into his abyss and what he found there satisfied him so fully he couldn't be tempted to look away. That's why when anybody asked me what exactly was wrong with my brother, I answered them truthfully.
The truth! The truth! The truth! It all depends on how you deal with it. Thingy took her nothingness and stitched it to the bottom of her foot. I took mine and sent it spinning into the forest where I pretended it perished --- eaten by a bear, felled by the forester's axe. Daniel and Jacob have made formulas of theirs, albeit very different ones, and my father pressed his to him as he would the body of a woman, reveling i the way it defined his form.
But Luke was an altogether different sort. Luke looked into his abyss and what he found there satisfied him so fully he couldn't be tempted to look away. That's why when anybody asked me what exactly was wrong with my brother, I answered them truthfully.
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July 10, 2016I picked up this book because I was mystified that someone thought it would be a good idea for artwork - much less the cover of a book - to photoshop a bundt cake over the top of a mountain. (Seriously, here's the stock photo they started with: https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-phot...)
Does the book have anything to do with mountains that have turned into cake? Cake at all? In any way?
No. Nope. It's supposed to be dark and mystical and I *think* (admittedly, I didn't get very far) magical realism.
I brought it home to try because I wanted to see if the writing inside was actually decent. If it wasn't, then, the book cover wouldn't matter much (to me, at any rate. The author should still be upset). If it was good writing, someone totally screwed her over. How can you take a book with Bundt Cake Mountain on it seriously?
I'm left without much of a helpful conclusion. I really can't tell you if the writing is good, or bad. It's certainly poetic, but it's also vague. It is a little like having a conversation with someone who might be a little high and wanders off on tangents.
One would not imagine a book could be criticized as having 'too many words,' but that was my feeling three chapters in.
But, as far as language goes, it's being (poetically) flung around all over the place here. Some may love it, I did not. Bundt Cake Mountain cover is still a disservice to the author, as it does absolutely nothing to reflect the contents of the book, and just made me crave cake. Same goes for the comments on the back of the book. Well... they didn't make me crave cake (more is the pity) but there was no book description to even give a clue what to expect, and the comments were obtuse and wacky (and pretty darn loose with sentence structure). Something about tessellations and dragons eyes and cold words and hot human hearts...I dunno, the cover was awful, front and back.
Does the book have anything to do with mountains that have turned into cake? Cake at all? In any way?
No. Nope. It's supposed to be dark and mystical and I *think* (admittedly, I didn't get very far) magical realism.
I brought it home to try because I wanted to see if the writing inside was actually decent. If it wasn't, then, the book cover wouldn't matter much (to me, at any rate. The author should still be upset). If it was good writing, someone totally screwed her over. How can you take a book with Bundt Cake Mountain on it seriously?
I'm left without much of a helpful conclusion. I really can't tell you if the writing is good, or bad. It's certainly poetic, but it's also vague. It is a little like having a conversation with someone who might be a little high and wanders off on tangents.
One would not imagine a book could be criticized as having 'too many words,' but that was my feeling three chapters in.
But, as far as language goes, it's being (poetically) flung around all over the place here. Some may love it, I did not. Bundt Cake Mountain cover is still a disservice to the author, as it does absolutely nothing to reflect the contents of the book, and just made me crave cake. Same goes for the comments on the back of the book. Well... they didn't make me crave cake (more is the pity) but there was no book description to even give a clue what to expect, and the comments were obtuse and wacky (and pretty darn loose with sentence structure). Something about tessellations and dragons eyes and cold words and hot human hearts...I dunno, the cover was awful, front and back.
November 22, 2016
frustrating mess of a novel, with big patches of great writing, short intense bursts of terrible writing, absolutely no proof-reading, not even spell-check, and i have no idea what the plot was.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews