RavePloughsharesIf the desire for selfhood is the beating heart of this collection of personal essays, the anthology also pulses with the relationship between wanting and writing, demonstrating how desire propels the urge to create ... Empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it an anthology that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, yes, but also between wanting and voice.
Lynn Steger Strong
RavePloughsharesDeeply affecting ... A mode that feels revelatory for capturing the nuances of entrenched family dynamics.
Meghan Gilliss
RavePloughsharesTold in lyrical, first-person fragments as lush, brutal, and self-contained as the island itself, the novel’s remote setting occasions an extended study of isolation ... The novel’s lyricism evinces what Virginia Tufte calls \'syntactic symbolism,\' in which a sentence’s syntax performs its meaning. Frequently, Tuck’s syntax suggests that she is reluctant to reveal some truths, even to herself. Meaning unfurls slowly like the fronds of a fern.
CJ Hauser
RavePloughsharesHauser’s interrogation of these stories reveals as much about what it means to love someone else as it does about what it means to love a story, and ultimately, this interrogative act leads her inward, as she turns the force of her questioning toward herself and the unexpected shape of her own life story ... It’s Hauser’s anxieties about the shape of her life story that, in turn, give shape to the narrative arc of her memoir. Written in nonlinear prose, the book’s essays do not proceed chronologically but—perhaps true to form for a theatre-kid turned novelist—are arranged in a spiraling adaptation of the four-act structure ... As Hauser grapples with the changing shape of her life story, it’s fitting that the shape of each essay and, indeed, the shape of the collection itself, are self-consciously experimental in form ... In giving herself and her readers permission to own the shape of their stories, Hauser demonstrates the liberatory potential of disrupting conventional narrative patterns ... Reading The Crane Wife is a bit like following Hauser into the Mirror Maze, her voice as narrator guiding the way through and out. Whether writing about familial or cultural stories, each text becomes a mirror in which Hauser sees herself reflected back. And in her willingness to turn inward, to truly face herself, Hauser’s essays open outward, becoming themselves mirrors into which readers might gaze.
