Jill Ciment

Devastating punch in the gut - every spare word contained perfect characterization. Brilliant. I wish I hadn't read it but I'm so glad I did.

After an interminably slow set-up, this amazing novel moves into high gear for its second half and never thereafter loosens its grip on the reader.

Because Ciment uses a first-person flashback narrative, the reader knows going in that the protagonist, Sara Ehrenreich, is a woman returning to 1970s New York after a 30-year involuntary sojourn on a remote Pacific island, and that her body is now covered in elaborate tattoos. Just how this all came about and what it says about Sara in show more particular, art in general, and the care and feeding of the human soul overall, makes up the rest of the book.

When we first meet Sara Rabinowitz, she is one of the numberless, faceless seamstresses in New York’s garment district, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and a budding Socialist who falls into a sexual relationship with Philip Ehrenreich, whose talents in the bedroom far exceed his artistic ambitions. The slow building of this relationship and the circumstances that drive them to an ill-starred journey to collect Polynesian ceremonial masks on behalf of a collector form the first half of the book. Teasing flash-forwards from Sara may be the only thing that can drag the reader through this tedious set-up, but the slog is rewarded when the pair finally reaches the island of Ta’un’uu.

Their expectations are shattered when, instead of finding naïve and simple natives eager to trade primitive art for New World trinkets, they find themselves immersed in a culture as alien, detailed, and potentially dangerous as any science-fiction construct ever developed. Their rookie mistakes and unwillingness to adapt to the circumstances they find lead to a tragic accident with horrific ramifications. Sara’s initially reluctant entry into the society within which she and Philip are now irrevocably marooned undergoes a change as deep and permanent as the tattoos which lead her to literally embody the island notion of breath as soul, music as life, and art as an indelible component of both.

Utterly unique in concept, this is a journey through time, space, and being itself. show less

The Body in Question by Jill Ciment
You are a photographer in your fifties, married for decades to a journalist 33 years your senior, now in his mid-eighties and in poor health. You are called for jury duty in central Florida, in a state where only six jurors are required for a murder trial. During your sequestration, you and another juror begin an affair. The murder suspect is one of two identical twins girls adopted at age four from a Russian orphanage, and the accusation is that one of show more them killed her infant brother in his crib by setting his diaper alight while he was asleep, although it’s her twin’s diary that contains incriminating evidence. This is the genius plot devised by an author whose skills at balancing the two elements are so potent that all outcomes are unpredictable and frightening. Told from the point of view of the photographer Juror C-2, her observations, her framing of the visual aspects of the defendant and her family in the courtroom, and her guilty knowledge that her affair with Juror F-17 will have an outcome on the verdict, all have a powerful hold on the reader. And to top it all off, the cover sketches of a series of eyes is a perfect accompaniment to the spell cast. This novel almost demands theatrical treatment.

Quote: "You know you're old when you look and feel like the morning after but there was no night before." show less

A tightly-packed novel about one woman's time as a juror on a controversial case and its aftermath. I couldn't put it down. The trial is really only a back drop to the human interactions that make up the story. I loved some of the author's choices, like only referring to characters by the jury number in the first half of the book. This was an Ann Patchett recommendation and it didn't disappoint.