A review by readingweird
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

5.0

It took me four months to read this book. Four months of my reading pattern mimicking the spiraling interior voice of maybe my favorite narrator of all time: from frenzy to fatigue and back again. I thought I was done with the maximalist novel, thought I’d seen all there was to see, and was skeptical that the form had anything left to offer me. Ellman did the impossible work of reclaiming the maximalist form for the sort of reader who’s never been invited inside of it before: the homemaker, the domestic woman, the housewife, the mother. It’s not just about her, it’s FOR her. But the novel’s strength lies in the realization that its preoccupations should be ours, should be yours, and we would do well to take note of what this narrator obsessively worries over: shootings, domestic violence, the mass murder of baby chicks, climate change, Laura Ingalls Wilder. The near impossibility of protecting precious things. To my mind Ellman has accomplished nothing short of putting an end to dismissively labeling fiction about domesticity “women’s fiction.” I loved it.