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keepreadingbooks 's review for:
Fen
by Daisy Johnson
It’s dark, it’s weird, it’s surreal, it’s folklore, it’s myth, it’s earthiness, uneasiness and bleakness. And I don’t know why – these are not things I necessarily tend to gravitate towards in books – but I dig it. I really dig it. This is what good writing is. This is what it means when someone (this particular compliment used by a reviewer to describe West, which I recently read) says of a book that it’s ‘whittled to perfection’. Every word and sentence have been meticulously chosen – or at least that’s the impression you get when reading it. As is usual with collections, some stories are stronger than others, but it's just generally a treat to read Johnson's writing.
It reminds me a lot of Lucy Wood’s collection The Sing of the Shore, where all the stories take place in Cornwall in the southwestern part of England, which I absolutely loved reading last year. I love collections that revolve around a specific place, and where the particulars of that place become a character in their own right, influencing the mood and atmosphere of every story. Here, it’s the Fens in eastern England. The landscape and its folklore and legends play an enormously important role in the lives of the characters in these stories, which are mostly about young people on the brink of adulthood coming to terms with themselves, their identity and sexuality, and the world around them. And they do that by transforming into eels and foxes, by eating men, by consuming and being consumed by superstitions and myths.
Fair warning: there’s a lot of sexual content in this collection, so if that’s not your thing or it makes you uncomfortable, don’t pick it up.
/NK
It reminds me a lot of Lucy Wood’s collection The Sing of the Shore, where all the stories take place in Cornwall in the southwestern part of England, which I absolutely loved reading last year. I love collections that revolve around a specific place, and where the particulars of that place become a character in their own right, influencing the mood and atmosphere of every story. Here, it’s the Fens in eastern England. The landscape and its folklore and legends play an enormously important role in the lives of the characters in these stories, which are mostly about young people on the brink of adulthood coming to terms with themselves, their identity and sexuality, and the world around them. And they do that by transforming into eels and foxes, by eating men, by consuming and being consumed by superstitions and myths.
Fair warning: there’s a lot of sexual content in this collection, so if that’s not your thing or it makes you uncomfortable, don’t pick it up.
/NK