Rachel Lyon (1) (1983–)

A richly imagined retelling of the Demeter/Persephone myth in a contemporary setting.

After being sexually assaulted at 16, Cory drifts away from the track her mother had set for her - academic achievement, college - and finds herself with no prospects upon graduation. She returns to River Rock as a counselor, and at the end of the summer, one of the parents invites her to come with them and work as the kids' nanny on a private island. Cory, ambivalent, goes with Rolo Picazo and finds herself show more adrift in a luxurious setting with little to no ability to communicate with the outside world, including her mother.

Emer, meanwhile, is on a work trip in China, where she learns some bad news: the "magic rice" her company has been developing does not grow. As the bad news brews into a shitstorm, Emer goes AWOL from work, desperate to find Cory, despite her co-worker's reassurance that Cory is eighteen (just) and doing what 18-year-olds do.

*Spoilers*

Emer's instincts are correct: As the CEO of Southgate Pharmaceuticals, Rolo has plenty of painkillers around the house, including one called Granadone (which he has mixed into a cocktail called Fruit of the Dead). Cory tries it once, then begins taking it regularly. When Rolo's ex-wife visits the island with her pastor husband and their new baby to retrieve the children, she urges Cory to return with them, but Cory stays. She learns the fate of the previous babysitter, Kelly - dead - and Rolo assaults her.

Emer, though, is drawing closer to her daughter: a Christian family invites her to their home, and at their church, she meets Rolo's ex-wife and kids, one of whom is humming a song he learned from Cory, who learned it from Emer. Armed with enough information to find the island, Emer reaches Cory and brings her back.

Quotes

...and she feels both trapped and protected. (Cory, 39)

It is a curse of hers, this difficulty separating her mother's voice from her own internal monologue. (Cory, 42)

Without a common tongue, language is not much more than an exchange of information. (Emer, 47)

She has the feeling she's forgetting something before remembering she's left everything behind. (Cory, 67)

She has somehow at once left her body and remained fully, deeply inside it. (Cory, 86)

But where I should have felt sympathy I found I had gone cold. (Emer, 106)

So anger grew, quick as a cancer, around my grief for her. (Emer, 107)

Minutes and hours and days my girl is gone, and every moment is a seed, and every seed grows into brambles, a tangled thorny knot of love and panic. (Emer, 110)

The mother she has now is so far removed from the mother she used to have, the mother she wants. (Corey, 135)

God help me, either I am wrong to be concerned or I am being gaslit by the world telling me to calm down, keep the faith, or whatever placating bullshit. (Emer, 157)

"...we are meaning-craving creatures, so we find patterns, and where no patterns exist we create them." (Rolo, 173)

,,,it troubles her, the whole scenario troubles her, the shifting dynamics, the ultraflexibility of her role, Rolo's unclear expectations. (Cory, 201)

"There's nothing easier than staying where you are" (Rolo to Cory, 237)

The struggle, in those brief moments when she slept, between working and rest, which is to say between selfhood and erasure. (Emer, 253) show less

There's a particular kind of character who just hits my sweet spot. A woman who makes a lot of bad decisions and ruins her own life is always interesting to read about; after all, what is fiction without conflict and what kind of conflict is more interesting than the stuff people bring on themselves? This novel features that main character. Lu is a young woman living in a terrible loft apartment in a sketchy part of Brooklyn in the nineties, before gentrification. She works at an expensive show more grocery store that allows her to pay her rent (most of the time) and buy film as she works on becoming a photographer. She is working on a series of self-portraits when it happens, she takes a truly great picture. Lu is sure that this is the key to getting her foot in the door of the art world, but who will she have to hurt to get her chance?

The very act of recall is like trying to photograph the sky. The infinite and ever-shifting colors of memory, its rippling light, cannot really be captured. Show someone who has never seen the sky a picture of the sky and you show them a picture of nothing.

This is a well-written debut novel that really captures a time and place, when if you were willing to live in a run down and rodent-infested space where the landlord is desperate to get people out, you could afford to live in New York. Where your neighbors could be people with serious issues or they could be artists using the space to create art. Self-Portrait with Boy is also a wonderful depiction of a person who longs to be an artist, to support herself with her pictures and to find a place within that milieu. I'm eager to read whatever Rachel Lyon writes next, even if it probably won't be exactly this book. show less

Cody had a not-great senior year of high school, and the aftermath of that is that she wasn't accepted to any colleges. She did manage to get a summer job as a junior camp counselor at the camp she's spent every summer at, which is good, but when camp wraps up, she's not looking forward to returning home. Then, the father of one of her charges makes her the offer of a job as babysitter to his two kids for the rest of the summer, until they are returned to their mother. The job is on his show more private island, where there's no cell phone service, and she has to decide immediately and sign an NDA, but she decides to take the job.

Emer isn't having a great time, either, discovering on a trip to China, that the new rice varietal that the non-profit she heads has failed, leaving the farmers they'd enticed with promises of higher yields, left destitute. Now she's fighting to keep the non-profit afloat, to find a solution, and also getting a few vague texts from her daughter about an internship for an unspecified businessman, but receiving no answer to her own calls and texts. She decides that despite the turmoil at her workplace, she has no choice but to go find her daughter.

This is loosely structured on the story of Demeter and Persephone, and it's a lot of fun to see the elements of the myth arising in different guises. There are two entertwined stories here; a single mother's search for her daughter and the story of a very young woman who isn't sure what she wants to do with the next few years, let alone her life and how she feels her way towards maturity while existing in a place designed to thwart thought and reason.

Lyon writes with nuance and understanding from both the viewpoint of a directionless young woman and her over-extended mother, creating two characters in conflict but who also deeply love each other. She also manages to make Emer's fear for her daughter as she learns where she is and who she is with compelling and urgent while also showing Cory as curious and eager to be included in with the grown-ups. Lyon is juggling two different stories here and she does so in a way that makes both fascinating and real. show less

This is a book designed around a moral quandary. Lu is a struggling photographer. She accidentally takes a photo of her neighbor’s son falling to his death, and it turns out to be one of the most compelling photos she has ever taken. She and the boy’s mother, Kate, become friends and Lu tries her best to provide emotional support to help Kate deal with her grief. In doing so, she feels more a part of her community of “artists in residence” of their apartment building. An art promoter show more is interested in the photo. Should Lu be loyal to her new best friend or take advantage of the opportunity to further her career?

I thought I knew what the answer “should be” (at least from my personal viewpoint) and it was interesting to follow the course of events to Lu’s ultimate decision and how she deals with the complications that arise. I found the first half to be engrossing. I think the author lost her way in the second half. The narrative diverts from the main storyline of the boy and the photo and goes down several rabbit trails. There is a long and strange diversion into Lu’s relationship with her aging father and a scenario involving a real estate takeover of her apartment building. Even so, it would make a great book to discuss with a group. show less