Reviews

Drink by Laura Madeline Wiseman

octavia_cade's review

4.0

Really quite lovely, although it's painful reading in parts. It's part meditation on mermaids, part exploration of the consequences of alcoholism, and each of the sections informs the other. A study in symbols, essentially, and of the things that bind them together.

I recently read another of Wiseman's books ("Wake") and in a way I wish I'd read this one first, as gives background to the other; explains it a little more I think.

andreablythe's review

5.0

As half-women, the mythical mermaids that swim and roll through the first third of Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Drink, call up the murky waters of teenage life. They are young women straddling two worlds, caught in the dreamy underwater quality of youth while looking forward to womanhood. The mermaids are “mercurial,” always on the verge of transformation in the same way teenagers exist in a constant state of flux, almost daily changing into new versions of themselves. They “change with the stories that change us” (“First Story”) and are capable of “unzipping the long, silky skirt of their tail” to step out into womanhood only to return to their tail and the sea (“The Switch”)....

Read the rest of my review of Drink at the Rhizomatic Ideas blog run by Zoetic Press.

I have also published an interview with Wiseman on mermaids, myth, and creative community.