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A review by illustrated_librarian
Enchanted Islands by Laura Coffey
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Thank you so much to @summersdalebooks and @l_j_coffey for sending me a copy of this!
'Tell me about a complicated man' demands the Poet of the Muse in the opening to Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, drawing the ire of Twitter classics bros. And in this personal Odyssey, moving nimbly between escapist travelogue, memoir, and myth, Coffey does just that.
A chance encounter with Wilson's translation, a painful breakup, and a pandemic lead Coffey on a six-month Odyssey of her own, searching out the islands where myth and reality collide. She intertwines her travels with stories from Greek mythology, seeing parallels between people she meets on the way and figures of legend, giving an enchanted air to her journey. But what begins as a quest to find the shape of herself again amidst loneliness and uncertainty becomes increasingly overshadowed by the deepening illness of her father.
A mercurial and beloved man, he faces down a terminal cancer diagnosis, slippery timescales and ever-changing treatments alongside the forced isolation of the pandemic. Throughout Coffey's journey her frequent calls with her father map their complex relationship against the backdrop of his worsening health, until it becomes clear she must return home and face what she fled.
Coffey's prose is immediate and sensory, rendering the delights of the lush isles she visits and the harrowing slow fading of her father with the same vividness. The pages are full of passion and honesty - she refuses to make her father a saint in his suffering and their relationship is all the more poignant for it, every fractious conversation and moment of sincere love building a human portrait of this towering figure in her life.
This moving meditation on love and loss braids the fraying strands that make up a life spinning apart back together again to create something stronger. It's a celebration of the redemption found in nature, in human connections and kindness in times of struggle, but most of all of finding a sense of home when the ground beneath you has been shaken.
'Tell me about a complicated man' demands the Poet of the Muse in the opening to Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, drawing the ire of Twitter classics bros. And in this personal Odyssey, moving nimbly between escapist travelogue, memoir, and myth, Coffey does just that.
A chance encounter with Wilson's translation, a painful breakup, and a pandemic lead Coffey on a six-month Odyssey of her own, searching out the islands where myth and reality collide. She intertwines her travels with stories from Greek mythology, seeing parallels between people she meets on the way and figures of legend, giving an enchanted air to her journey. But what begins as a quest to find the shape of herself again amidst loneliness and uncertainty becomes increasingly overshadowed by the deepening illness of her father.
A mercurial and beloved man, he faces down a terminal cancer diagnosis, slippery timescales and ever-changing treatments alongside the forced isolation of the pandemic. Throughout Coffey's journey her frequent calls with her father map their complex relationship against the backdrop of his worsening health, until it becomes clear she must return home and face what she fled.
Coffey's prose is immediate and sensory, rendering the delights of the lush isles she visits and the harrowing slow fading of her father with the same vividness. The pages are full of passion and honesty - she refuses to make her father a saint in his suffering and their relationship is all the more poignant for it, every fractious conversation and moment of sincere love building a human portrait of this towering figure in her life.
This moving meditation on love and loss braids the fraying strands that make up a life spinning apart back together again to create something stronger. It's a celebration of the redemption found in nature, in human connections and kindness in times of struggle, but most of all of finding a sense of home when the ground beneath you has been shaken.