What do you think?
Rate this book
Blasted
Blasted is a story of Ruby Jones, an irreverent, exuberant, and troubled woman who lurches between love affairs and cities. The narrative shifts between generations and geographies, between contemporary life and stories as old as the hill that looms over Ruby's birthplace. All the while, she is haunted by mysteries that surround her father and the generations before him. When Ruby unravels at last, she must face the demons that pursue her. Steeped in Newfoundland folklore, Blasted mines a rich vein of experience, layering the mundane and the magical, and evoking the forces that inhabit the land.
260 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2008
1 person is currently reading
25 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 18, 2016
This book is infused with Newfoundland folklore. Fairy folklore to be precise; the Island's greatest oral tradition. Reading the uncomfortable plight of Ruby, I suspect that Kate Story is less a writer and more a fantastical storyteller. I loved the words; I loved the lessons. It was time well spent, winding through the rocky lichen strewn paths with the whispers of the Beothuk in the wind.
January 9, 2017
This book was like a beautiful trainwreck. Equal parts magical, tragic, frustrating, and surreal, Blasted blended fairy lore with themes of isolation, family, and unconditional love to create a compelling read that will be on my mind for some time to come.
January 19, 2011
My review of this wonderful book is still up at The Internet Review of Science Fiction, now sadly folded.
http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/1...
December, 2008: Review of Kate Story's debut novel Blasted
by Ursula Pflug
Kate Story's debut novel Blasted is simply sensational—or, parts of it are.
The protagonist, Ruby, grows up in St. John's, Newfoundland, in the shadow of the Southside Hill. Her mom's fretful, her dad's a little strange, her grandparents, who live next door, are stern and disapproving. She's an outcast amongst her peers, or just feels like one. She deals with these, so far not overly threatening circumstances, by joining the neighborhood juvenile delinquent club—drinking, having sex and vandalizing.
The Southside milieu is faithfully described. We feel we are in the kitchen with Ruby and her family, the tea kettle always screeching, while storm clouds roll across the Hill outside the back window. The little patch of backyard garden, with its walls constantly falling down and constantly being repaired, serves as a kind of metaphor for the Things Out There which can be appeased but never truly held at bay. There are times we feel we might be reading a Victorian novel; the descriptions are detailed and the plot advances slowly. However, this in some way suits what Story is describing: the endlessly tainted relationships of a loving yet complicated family with its feet firmly rooted in the past.
A blasted family.
There is another side to Ruby. Sometimes on her walks she sees things: a circle of women dressed in white. They're there, and then they're not. She obsesses over Shanawdithit, the last of the Beothuks, an indigenous Newfoundland tribe. We begin to understand that Ruby's later violence and promiscuity are a kind of overcompensation. That and the fact that in the winter her father seems almost another person entirely. He eats a great deal and hides in the bedroom. He becomes moody. His eyes get a flat cast to them, a kind of I'm-not-here look. This causes a lot of tension and whispering in the family.
These Newfoundland chapters are intercut with those in which, after her move to Toronto, Ruby spends several more years drinking and having casual sex, supporting herself as a diner waitress while she does so. She hangs out with a downtown arty crowd including Cree multi-media artist Blue and the older Irish painter Brendan. Both are quite successful. We are not entirely sure why they include Ruby, who is prone to long melancholic navel-gazing binges, interspersed with occasionally violent navel-gazing binges.
Then we find out her parents died in a car crash when Ruby was ten. This helps to explain. Ruby's grandmother dies and she flies home to Newfoundland, where she cooks for her taciturn grandfather and finally gets to know his sister, Aunt Queenie, heretofore ostracized. Queenie hints at the family secrets; the bad blood Ruby has been conscious of all her life. Ruby remembers strange moments, finds peculiar photographs, and can't get full answers from anyone.
She goes back to Toronto, to her so-called life.
And here it is, almost as if Blasted turns into a different book. It stops being a well-crafted first novel about family secrets, alcoholism, the Toronto Queen Street crowd and Newfoundland fairy lore and becomes instead a strange, shining, souring thing brimming with beauty and terror, pain and love, insight and redemption, even its language transforming. Story begins to take real risks with her prose, fledging big, sparkly, poetic wings. The pace picks up, and how.
On the surface, Blasted is about a fairy-led family; a curse which usually skips generations. The fantastical elements, including a flock of terrifying fairy pigeons that break and enter into Blue's Toronto loft where Ruby has been hiding out, are seamlessly done. The switch from realism to fantasy is always believable; the poetic imagery of the fantastic is created in brushstrokes which are lush, dangerous, seductive and tragic.
Kind of like Them.
There is, however, a third book here. While the supernatural lore is both thoroughly researched and wonderfully described, Blasted is also a metaphorical story about intergenerational family problems. The fact that there are secrets can cause trauma in and of itself. The young person sees herself as the family victim, but as she grows older, learns compassion. Her friends help. What do you do with your pain? In this second half there are paragraphs almost transcendent in their beauty and insight. We are left with multiple possible interpretations, much as in Shirley Jackson's beautiful novella We Have Always Lived in The Castle.
Hence, Blasted is neither quite a mainstream nor a genre novel—although its literary prose stylings and thin on the ground elements of the fantastic in the first half place it more firmly in the first camp. I would call it a slipstream novel, but this is a kind of hair-splitting adhered to mainly by those in the genre publishing world.
The first chapters, describing her childhood and her drinking adventures as a young adult in Toronto, could have been further edited. We don't really need to know quite as much as we are told. It slows the pace and Ruby occasionally strikes us as a little self-involved. We no longer feel that way at the end, by which time Ruby is heroic in her survival and her triumph. I wish we had seen this side of her a little sooner, to keep us interested. However, this kind of thematic and stylistic weaving is challenging, and given the complexity and ambition of this beautiful first novel, it is a pretty minor quibble.
Lovers of literary fantasy or magic realist fiction including The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, John Crowley's Little, Big, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Tomson Highway's Kiss of The Fur Queen are sure to love this book.
Copyright © 2008, Ursula Pflug. All Rights Reserved.
Ursula Pflug is author of the novel "Green Music" and the story collection "After The Fires." She is also a journalist, produced playwright and creative writing instructor.
http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/1...
December, 2008: Review of Kate Story's debut novel Blasted
by Ursula Pflug
Kate Story's debut novel Blasted is simply sensational—or, parts of it are.
The protagonist, Ruby, grows up in St. John's, Newfoundland, in the shadow of the Southside Hill. Her mom's fretful, her dad's a little strange, her grandparents, who live next door, are stern and disapproving. She's an outcast amongst her peers, or just feels like one. She deals with these, so far not overly threatening circumstances, by joining the neighborhood juvenile delinquent club—drinking, having sex and vandalizing.
The Southside milieu is faithfully described. We feel we are in the kitchen with Ruby and her family, the tea kettle always screeching, while storm clouds roll across the Hill outside the back window. The little patch of backyard garden, with its walls constantly falling down and constantly being repaired, serves as a kind of metaphor for the Things Out There which can be appeased but never truly held at bay. There are times we feel we might be reading a Victorian novel; the descriptions are detailed and the plot advances slowly. However, this in some way suits what Story is describing: the endlessly tainted relationships of a loving yet complicated family with its feet firmly rooted in the past.
A blasted family.
There is another side to Ruby. Sometimes on her walks she sees things: a circle of women dressed in white. They're there, and then they're not. She obsesses over Shanawdithit, the last of the Beothuks, an indigenous Newfoundland tribe. We begin to understand that Ruby's later violence and promiscuity are a kind of overcompensation. That and the fact that in the winter her father seems almost another person entirely. He eats a great deal and hides in the bedroom. He becomes moody. His eyes get a flat cast to them, a kind of I'm-not-here look. This causes a lot of tension and whispering in the family.
These Newfoundland chapters are intercut with those in which, after her move to Toronto, Ruby spends several more years drinking and having casual sex, supporting herself as a diner waitress while she does so. She hangs out with a downtown arty crowd including Cree multi-media artist Blue and the older Irish painter Brendan. Both are quite successful. We are not entirely sure why they include Ruby, who is prone to long melancholic navel-gazing binges, interspersed with occasionally violent navel-gazing binges.
Then we find out her parents died in a car crash when Ruby was ten. This helps to explain. Ruby's grandmother dies and she flies home to Newfoundland, where she cooks for her taciturn grandfather and finally gets to know his sister, Aunt Queenie, heretofore ostracized. Queenie hints at the family secrets; the bad blood Ruby has been conscious of all her life. Ruby remembers strange moments, finds peculiar photographs, and can't get full answers from anyone.
She goes back to Toronto, to her so-called life.
And here it is, almost as if Blasted turns into a different book. It stops being a well-crafted first novel about family secrets, alcoholism, the Toronto Queen Street crowd and Newfoundland fairy lore and becomes instead a strange, shining, souring thing brimming with beauty and terror, pain and love, insight and redemption, even its language transforming. Story begins to take real risks with her prose, fledging big, sparkly, poetic wings. The pace picks up, and how.
On the surface, Blasted is about a fairy-led family; a curse which usually skips generations. The fantastical elements, including a flock of terrifying fairy pigeons that break and enter into Blue's Toronto loft where Ruby has been hiding out, are seamlessly done. The switch from realism to fantasy is always believable; the poetic imagery of the fantastic is created in brushstrokes which are lush, dangerous, seductive and tragic.
Kind of like Them.
There is, however, a third book here. While the supernatural lore is both thoroughly researched and wonderfully described, Blasted is also a metaphorical story about intergenerational family problems. The fact that there are secrets can cause trauma in and of itself. The young person sees herself as the family victim, but as she grows older, learns compassion. Her friends help. What do you do with your pain? In this second half there are paragraphs almost transcendent in their beauty and insight. We are left with multiple possible interpretations, much as in Shirley Jackson's beautiful novella We Have Always Lived in The Castle.
Hence, Blasted is neither quite a mainstream nor a genre novel—although its literary prose stylings and thin on the ground elements of the fantastic in the first half place it more firmly in the first camp. I would call it a slipstream novel, but this is a kind of hair-splitting adhered to mainly by those in the genre publishing world.
The first chapters, describing her childhood and her drinking adventures as a young adult in Toronto, could have been further edited. We don't really need to know quite as much as we are told. It slows the pace and Ruby occasionally strikes us as a little self-involved. We no longer feel that way at the end, by which time Ruby is heroic in her survival and her triumph. I wish we had seen this side of her a little sooner, to keep us interested. However, this kind of thematic and stylistic weaving is challenging, and given the complexity and ambition of this beautiful first novel, it is a pretty minor quibble.
Lovers of literary fantasy or magic realist fiction including The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, John Crowley's Little, Big, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Tomson Highway's Kiss of The Fur Queen are sure to love this book.
Copyright © 2008, Ursula Pflug. All Rights Reserved.
Ursula Pflug is author of the novel "Green Music" and the story collection "After The Fires." She is also a journalist, produced playwright and creative writing instructor.
June 4, 2022
Given to me by my sister who, in turn, received from her Canadian friend who wrote this book! It is a contemporary story about a young woman trying to make her way in the world amidst the handicap of family dysfunction in her past. Some Newfoundland folklore woven into the plot to enlighten you about the Beothuk, the indigenous people of Newfoundland, now killed off. Setting of story is also in Toronto. This book is hard to find as it is printed by a Canadian publisher.
February 8, 2025
Still scratching my head. I did not think it was a page turner and actually a little monotonous. I never caught on to the fairies importance until near the end of the book. I enjoyed the description of the characters and their personalities but the main character “Ruby” was too much of a train wreck to take seriously. If I had known that it had an undertone of sci-fi I would have passed before starting it.
May 24, 2014
Steeped in the rich fairy lore of Newfoundland and a sense of longing for home, Kate Story’s "Blasted" is a novel about dislocation. Story’s stream of consciousness style of writing beautifully enhances the sense of temporal and special dislocation represented by movement through and slippage into fairy realms. Her poetic use of language adds to the depth of the landscape, it’s history, and the people upon it, reveling in the simultaneous beauty and terror embedded in the land.
To read a longer version of this review, you can visit my website at http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.co... .
To read a longer version of this review, you can visit my website at http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.co... .
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews