Laura Adamczyk

Island City, from Laura Adamczyk, is a novel I want to come back to in the future and see if I can read it in a different manner. I found this to be not only a good novel but one that gave me, as a reader, some flexibility in how I wanted to engage.

Maybe I should start with a brief explanation of what I mean by reading it in a different manner. Like any novel, this can be read from the perspective of simply a reader. Yes, we know we are reading what the other people in the bar are hearing, but we don't really think of ourselves as someone in the bar. We use that as a way to understand what the protagonist is saying and how it is being said. When I saw that this was a long monologue over the course of one evening, I made the decision to read it "as if" I was a patron in the bar. I imagined (using my own real-life experiences as a gauge) how her comments might sound if she was talking about my hometown. This worked very well for me and gave me perhaps a bit more ways into her personality.

If you simply want a "this then this" type novel you can read this as the story of her life with the understanding that it is conversational because she is (periodically) in actual dialogue and she considers her monologue to be something she is creating for and with those people. You may think these read mostly episodic if you don't grasp the bigger picture and the arc of both her life and the novel. It would, I think, be enjoyable even like that, but the strength of the novel is watching the change in the protagonist, both over her life and over the course of several drinks and an evening of what certainly seems like reflection, especially the further she gets (into her life story and into the alcohol).

Reading it while, for lack of a better term, role-playing a patron in the bar really, for me, brought a lot of the subtlety to the fore. Rather than just hear her describe life in the town, I imagined where I might have nodded along and where I might have thought she was exaggerating the town's role. While any novel is a joint effort between the author and the reader, I felt like I was given the opportunity to make this almost as much my creation as Adamczyk's. Though admittedly my part requires far less creativity and skill, but it did help to make the story speak more directly to me.

Even with how I chose to engage with the novel, I still found myself relating to aspects of her life, ways she felt about things that happened around her, and especially the times when torn between (largely chosen) helplessness and the guilt/remorse that comes from feeling you put too much on someone else's shoulders.

One part I found fun was figuring out some of the events/movies/people/etc she referenced without naming. I had to do a couple of searches but was happy when I recognized some almost immediately (Heath Ledger for example). Part of the fun was figuring it out, but part of the fun was thinking about how things that don't concern us directly factor into how we remember and make sense of our lives. Celebrities, shows, even commercials have served as markers along my life's path, and our protagonist is no different.

I would highly recommend this to readers who like stories that are both micro and macro in nature. By that, I mean we are trying to figure out her life as we read, yet we are also working on why she is in this bar, on this night, spilling her guts to these people.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (more)