Starred review from August 1, 2019
Characters in the throes of grief navigate their displacement in this collection of stories. Taking readers from a small flat in Montreal to the vast dusty spaces of Western Australia, these 10 stories feature characters who are émigrés or travelers, a hybrid, in-between state that mirrors their inner states. In "Sinkers," a young man returns to his mother's Australian hometown to spread her ashes, though the town is completely underwater. In another story, a young Frenchwoman whose husband is killed near the Syria-Turkey border starts over in an American city and forms a melancholy relationship with a neighbor's dog ("Chavez"). For two Australian women, married to each other just 13 days, an American hotel room on a road trip is the site of an argument over which of them should become pregnant in their quest to start a family ("Anything Remarkable"). Even characters grounded in nameless suburbia, like the wife who can no longer hide her revulsion for the much-watched pornographic tape she and her husband made as newlyweds ("Post-structuralism for Beginners"), are facing down a sense of becoming unmoored, caught between where they thought they belonged and an unknowable future. Rowe (A Loving, Faithful Animal, 2017) is a writer of great subtlety, and what could, in lesser hands, be quiet stories from familiar emotional landscapes become revelatory here. Rowe's shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose. As one character says of a pond that has drained away with only its frozen surface remaining: "It is magic in the sense that there is no metaphor you can build out of it that will not undermine its magic." So, too, with Rowe's work. Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely.
COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
September 30, 2019
The 10 sharp, vivid stories in Rowe’s first collection (after the novel A Loving, Faithful Animal) showcase characters overwhelmed by the harsh and often beautiful places in which they feel not at all at home. In “Sinkers,” Cristian takes his mother’s ashes to the lake that now, courtesy of the hydroelectric company, covers the town where she grew up, and tries vainly to locate her sunken, ravaged home under a lake that “tells him little, dumbly reflecting back the deepening sky.” Severine, the narrator of “Chavez,” consumed by a grief only gradually revealed, runs from France to a grim neighborhood in a North American city, where she is saddled with a mysterious, “wolflike” dog whose owner has left ostensibly for a couple of weeks, but never returns. “What Passes for Fun,” the collection’s shortest story, more prose poem than fully developed narrative, centers on an image of the physical world that serves as metaphor for the whole volume, a sheet of dazzling ice suspended over a pond that has dropped away, apparently solid but actually dangerously fragile. While the characters’ predicaments are often familiar, Rowe’s fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader’s attention. The disorienting, sometimes fragmented prose mirrors the characters’ sense of ongoing loss and will linger with readers.
September 15, 2019
In Rowe's first short-story collection, the Australian author's talent for relating her very human characters' rich interior lives is even more on display than in her impressive debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal (2017). Brotherly rivalry, pitch-perfectly portrayed, gives way to something a bit different in the opening story, "Glisk." New in a foreign city, a woman takes care of her neighbor's dog while unwinding the tragedy that sent her there in the collection's longest piece, "Chavez." In "Post-Structuralism for Beginners," a woman is haunted by an old sex tape. In "The Once-Drowned Man," a taxi driver accepts a dubious fare, during which she passes a circus that sends her back to an essential longing from her youth. Love and loss underpin these 10 stories, which follow characters' evolving acceptance of their situations, by degrees. Often, Rowe pierces through threatening clouds with humor, especially in her genuine, clever dialogue. Taking place in Canada, Australia, and the U.S., these expansive tales are bound to grip, surprise, and enrapture short-story lovers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
Starred review from August 1, 2019
Characters in the throes of grief navigate their displacement in this collection of stories. Taking readers from a small flat in Montreal to the vast dusty spaces of Western Australia, these 10 stories feature characters who are �migr�s or travelers, a hybrid, in-between state that mirrors their inner states. In "Sinkers," a young man returns to his mother's Australian hometown to spread her ashes, though the town is completely underwater. In another story, a young Frenchwoman whose husband is killed near the Syria-Turkey border starts over in an American city and forms a melancholy relationship with a neighbor's dog ("Chavez"). For two Australian women, married to each other just 13 days, an American hotel room on a road trip is the site of an argument over which of them should become pregnant in their quest to start a family ("Anything Remarkable"). Even characters grounded in nameless suburbia, like the wife who can no longer hide her revulsion for the much-watched pornographic tape she and her husband made as newlyweds ("Post-structuralism for Beginners"), are facing down a sense of becoming unmoored, caught between where they thought they belonged and an unknowable future. Rowe (A Loving, Faithful Animal, 2017) is a writer of great subtlety, and what could, in lesser hands, be quiet stories from familiar emotional landscapes become revelatory here. Rowe's shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose. As one character says of a pond that has drained away with only its frozen surface remaining: "It is magic in the sense that there is no metaphor you can build out of it that will not undermine its magic." So, too, with Rowe's work. Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely.
COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
June 27, 2019
A man reflects on a life-changing act his brother committed many years ago; a cab driver in America picks up a mysterious passenger who wants to be driven over the Canadian border; a newly married couple carefully navigate a recurring argument in the midst of a road trip. The stories in Josephine Rowe’s third short fiction collection traverse continents and characters, but their connecting thread is how they capture their protagonists at a particular juncture in their lives. Many of the stories in Here Until August hinge on past events or decisions that have somehow shaped their characters’ present, and Rowe effortlessly makes this reflective approach to her storytelling feel captivating and emotionally charged. Her prose is crisp and evocative, and certain lines deftly pin down the small but meaningful moments that define human experience: a wife imagines her husband ‘leaving the house each morning with pieces of himself hidden in his shoes, his coat lining, folded up small between the pages of his lecture notes’; a young woman stands at a window and imagines it as ‘the kind of window where if you just stand for long enough, somebody will come and put their hand on your shoulder’. Here Until August is a powerful and intimate collection that’s sure to hold strong appeal for literary fiction readers.
Carody Culver is a freelance writer, assistant editor at Griffith Review and a contributing editor at Peppermint magazine