PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn addition to memorializing the centrality of women in war...The Shadow King goes a step further and masterfully illustrates how being a woman in this world is itself so often a kind of warfare ... Mengiste’s narration is fluid, moving between characters, as well as forward and backward in time ... Mengiste’s use of a shifting point of view is generous: no character is too irrelevant—or too immoral—to become momentarily central, to be given a voice ... Mengiste’s narrative defies the moralistic view that could so easily be applied to this conflict. Instead, she emphasizes the similarities between characters’ experiences, and the constancy of suffering ... For Mengiste’s characters, escape is made possible by light and by shadow. Sunlight vividly fills almost every scene ... Mengiste uses this polarity of light and shade not as a clichéd moral about good and evil, but rather as an acknowledgment that every human body is a site of war, of internal conflict, of a division between disparate selves that cannot unify.
Sarah Weinman
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksBy the end of The Real Lolita, I could not help feeling tenderness for [Sally] Horner. Weinman has presented a compelling outline of a life—touching in its pain, resilience, and surprising banality, and animated by the author’s impressive ability to tell a good story even when the material is slim—but she hasn’t managed to fill it in. The questions of victimhood gnaw at us long after the \'real\' story has been told. What is it like to suffer? What is it like to survive? How does a little girl cope with the absurdity of life, and with her own unarticulated pain? How does she wrest back control? Ironically, if we want to hear a victim’s voice, we have to return to the fictional Lolita ...
Lolita and The Real Lolita are both confrontations with the silence of abuse, the tyranny of the male narrator, but they are also, at their cores, celebrations of two girls whose lives and deaths are simultaneously tragic and banal, heroic and endearing, terrible and human. And yet, ultimately, only the fictional girl succeeds in undermining the male narrator. Lolita retains power; Sally cannot. That is the magical democracy of fiction. Only the fictional Lolita can appear to us, vibrant and resilient. If Sarah Weinman wants to hear the silenced speak, she might turn to the only realm in which that is possible—the realm of art.
