Young Women Feel the Pressure of Femininity in These Early Novels


Things start to change when Amy’s host, Gary, invites her to weekly dinners to hone her cooking skills for her Ukrainian fiancée to arrive. The closer she gets, the more Amy gets caught up in an elaborate self-deception: To boost her self-confidence, she tries to give herself a “placebo” to convince herself she’s already a certified EMT. Her plan backfires and before long Amy returns herself. it started.

This is a flawed start: Scenes are dragged, dialogue formatted. Amy’s past doesn’t help much to explain why she does the things she does. “We had our own story and that was just as interesting as the others,” says Amy, who is optimistic about Gary. Through narratives, McClorey manages to capture people’s desire to shape our lives and how devastating it can be when reality separates from them.

MAGMA
by Thora Hjorleifsdottir
Translated by Meg Matich
199 p. Black cat. Paper, $16.

In a preface, Hjorleifsdottir writes that this book is “consisting of characters voicing realities that women have long lived in in silence.” He dedicates it to those who “talk”.

Unfortunately for such an important topic, the ongoing novel about 20-year-old Lilja devoted to her abusive boyfriend turns the characters into flat, didactic archetypes rather than purely flesh-and-blood individuals.

Many of these short chapters, some of which are only a few sentences long, read like the diary entries of a girl under 20. “Everything is empty and meaningless compared to him,” Lilja says. “I feel like I could leave myself behind to love this man.” (Hjorleifsdottir, also a poet, wrote “Magma” in Icelandic – some of the subtleties of this language may have been lost in translation.)

The turns Lilja’s relationship takes are all too familiar and hard to watch: Her boyfriend belittles and controls her while he sleeps with other women he meets online. Lilja begins to self-harm to cope. He believes that when they act together, everything will be fine, but his behavior and mental health are getting worse. Hjorleifsdottir’s talent demonstrates how an abuser can seamlessly colonize a person’s entire life, piece by piece, without realizing it until it’s too late, unnoticed.



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