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Loading... The Juliet Stories (original 2012; edition 2012)by Carrie Snyder (Author)
Work InformationThe Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder (2012)
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) MaggieFlo | May 27, 2014 |  Beautifully told in an immediate, almost raw, style, the stories may stand alone, but together they form a linear structure as Juliet moves into adolescence and beyond into adulthood. Life remains unpredictable even after Juliet and her family move back to Canada. Love, desire, death, fealty and falsehood – Juliet experiences them all. Some things she comprehends, some she does not. And ever she appears to be groping toward some kind of future, some clarity about herself and what she will do with her life. The first half, especially, is tremendously affecting. The second half is less direct, less lived, more told, less certain, and possibly more challenging. It would be hard to say which I prefer more. Or perhaps I’m simply confessing that I have been won over and would gladly follow Carrie Snyder wherever her narrative voice might lead. It would be hard not to expect, or at least hope for, great things to come from this author. Recommended. (  ) RandyMetcalfe | Dec 9, 2013 | Gail.C.Bull | Feb 25, 2013 | It is like the puppy described later in the work: tough and nippy in parts, lively and new in others. “Love for the animal rushes through Juliet for its newness, its capacity for destruction. She bends to the puppy’s snarl and snap. She gathers its surprising and lively weight into her arms, against her chest: fur tough, claws smooth, rolls of fat around its ribs. It nips her ear, and a tooth catches on the tiny silver ring Juliet wears in the lobe, and the wince of pain gleams.” Give it a good home and read it now, so you can say that you have a copy without the awards stickers, because you knew it was inevitable. It will most definitely be on my list of Favourite Reads for 2012. (I have a lot, lot, lot more to say about this novel, here on Buried In Print. Please check it out.) (  ) buriedinprint | Aug 29, 2012 |
 Writing a novel as a series of short stories is a challenging project...Reading such a story also proves challenging; the central hook is not a tight, propelling plot, but rather the deftness of the writer’s craft.Snyder’s new book is the rare successful execution, a stream of sensual imagery that grows more sophisticated with each page.....Ultimately, despite its lushness — or perhaps because of it — this book demands much from readers, and may frustrate those who expect an A to B progression of drama. For those who endure, the textured imagery, heavy with meaning, provides its own reward. The Juliet Stories is a well-crafted and imaginative novel-in-stories that explores and reflects back on the impact of a few monumental years in the life of the book’s namesake. It combines straight-ahead realism with fractured, dream-like prose, in a successful exploration of the merits and pitfalls of family life....The prose shifts as well, as Juliet becomes more of a distant third-person narrator, and we are let more closely into the minds of other characters  This all makes for very rich material....The book unfortunately slips during its second half when the Friesens move to an unnamed city in an unnamed province in Canada and Juliet turns from child to adolescent to young adult. In the process, the year-and-a-half her family spent in Nicaragua gradually recedes into the background, and Snyder’s occasional attempts to show the impact of this experience on the development of her central character feel contrived. Juliet does not so much develop as stagnate. In Nicaragua, she is a likeable child, a voracious reader and careful observer, but the predominant trait of her adolescence and young adulthood is a haughtiness more appreciated by the narrator than the reader. The writing sometimes becomes frustratingly poetical. Characters do not simply drive, but sail “on the burning wings of excavated fossil fuels.” Similes become increasingly idiosyncratic and fail to enhance their details — a farmhouse’s cellar is damp like “the inside of a lung.” Meanwhile, the present tense, through continued use, loses its former immediacy and turns monotonous. All of this makes the reader pine for the very rich material and stronger writing of the book’s first half: We miss Nicaragua as much as Juliet does. Like her first book, Hair Hat, Carrie Snyder’s sophomore offering is a collection of linked short stories. Here they are arranged in a novelistic arc, following the titular heroine from a childhood caught between foreign languages and continents to the quiet joys and terrors of adulthood. While laid out chronologically, each story is strong and vibrant enough to stand on its own....While The Juliet Stories deals with emotionally and politically charged themes, Snyder’s prose style and story structure seldom feel manipulative or argumentative. She avoids aestheticizing trauma and instead offers strong characterization, clear and lushly poetic language, and above all, the kind of nourishment that comes from a moving story, beautifully told. AwardsNotable Lists
'a coming-of-age tale about the painful and wonderful experiences of motherhood... a compelling novel told in the most beautifully crafted way, and the frequent lapse into disjointed stream of consciousness renders the style close to that of Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. It is a wonderful rarity when a book leaves you so profoundly affected' - We Love This Book Juliet Friesen is ten years old when her family moves to Nicaragua. It is 1984, the height of Nicaragua's post-revolutionary war, and the peace-activist Friesens have come to protest American involvement. In the midst of this tumult, Juliet's family lives outside of the boundaries of ordinary life. They've escaped, and the ordinary rules don't apply. Threat is pervasive, danger is real, but the extremity of the situation also produces a kind of euphoria, protecting Juliet's family from its own cracks and conflicts. When Juliet's younger brother becomes sick with cancer, their adventure ends abruptly. The Friesens return to Canada only to find that their lives beyond Nicaragua have become the war zone. One by one, they drift from each other, and Juliet grows to adulthood, pulled between her desire to live a free life like the one she remembers in Nicaragua, and her desire to build for her own children a life more settled than her parents could provide. With laser-sharp prose and breathtaking insight, these stories herald Carrie Snyder as one of Canada's most prodigiously talented writers. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.82)
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