RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksSchanoes’s stories blend details from her personal life with recognizable elements of collective Western tales and myths, slyly updating and deftly critiquing family legends. Burning Girls is also like a Rivera mural in that it, too, is immersive. Like each individual panel in the Detroit Industry Murals, Schanoes’s stories contain much more than they originally seem to suggest. These tales are sophisticated cultural interventions: some challenge the reader to rethink received historical narratives, while others use fairy tales to challenge the gendered and gentrified conventions of fundamental cultural tropes. All are a heady mix of magic, myth, fantasy, and social commentary, from a politically left Jewish feminist perspective. Schanoes’s fairy tales are dark, closer to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm than to their more recent, bowdlerized versions. These are adult stories for our age ... Like Diego Rivera, Veronica Schanoes combines past and present, myth and current events to situate us in our own cultural context, drawing our eyes and hearts to details that surprise and resonate. Like the Baba Yaga, Schanoes takes us into her extraordinary dwelling; she shows us terror, cruelty, joy, satisfaction, grim reality, and revolutionary interventions of all kinds. We emerge, when she allows, in an unexpected place full of emotion and thought, and the transmuted understanding that peoples’ lives are more terrible, more precarious, and more miraculous than we can fully fathom.
C. S. Malerich
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksOne of the most striking historical themes that the book addresses is the role of slavery in the industrial revolution of New England. Malerich’s novella acknowledges both the characters’ awareness of their own complicity in the slavery system and their distress at its toll ... Through the license granted by the fantastic, Malerich incarnates the malevolent social power of the dehumanizing system that enforces the ownership of one person by another. She goes further, to emphasize that Northern US industry depended not just on slaves but on the profound oppression that brutally suppressed slaves’ magic for retribution ... This picture is oversimplified, seeming to deny all agency to people who exerted agency consistently in ways large and small. But having a young white woman in 1836 Lowell react to slavery with such vivid horror does have an historical basis, though an incomplete one ... some of the complexity of the relationship between the free and the unfree in US history emerges in Malerich’s prose ... In our difficult political world where livelihoods take lives and laborers struggle for basic recognition, this tale about young women forming solidarity to win justice and equality is a much-needed tonic. Its modern reflection on and fantastic exploration of workers’ lives shows how powerfully fantasy can enrich readers’ understanding of the political and economic forces at work even now. At the last, though, one of Malerich’s most adroit choices is knowing when to put the fantastic down ... In its close examination of the forces in workers’ lives, the meaning of labor, and struggles for solidarity, C. S. Malerich’s book The Factory Witches of Lowell is an apt contribution to the proletarian fantastic.
