The Small Backs of Children

May 25, 2015
In this daring novel, Yuknavitch (The Chronology of Water) takes a provocative look at the intimate relationship among love, art, and sex in a group of emotionally scarred artists who want to save one of their own. Written in the voices of characters without first names—photographer, writer, poet, performance artist, playwright, filmmaker, and painter—the novel begins in modern Eastern Europe (likely Lithuania), occupied by an unseen force, where a photojournalist captures an award-winning shot: a young girl running from her exploding home, in which the rest of her family dies. The girl escapes into the woods, making her way to a widow’s home; the widow teaches her about art, and the girl begins to paint. Meanwhile, an American writer who is friends with the photographer, is hospitalized with severe depression. The writer’s best friend, a poet, believes she can help the writer; she enters the war zone to bring the orphaned girl to the United States. Yuknavitch’s novel is disturbing and challenging, but undoubtedly leaves its mark.

May 15, 2015

Gorgeous, scary, and a breathtaking rush to read, this book is less a meditation than a provocation on the power and dangers of art. It opens in eastern Europe with a news photographer taking a picture of a girl rushing from a house exploding behind her, killing her family. The photograph wins a prize, leaving its creator in turmoil, but it has momentous meaning for the writer, a friend of the photographer mourning a stillborn daughter. (Characters are referenced by their occupations only, which instead of seeming pretentious or depersonalizing effectively strips them to their essence.) When the writer ends up hospitalized, she's attended by her performance artist friend, her playwright brother (who scripts some of the scenes), and her filmmaker husband, so distraught he punches out his wife's ex-husband, a baldly self-serving painter. When the poet shows up, fresh from graphically depicted scenes at lesbian sex clubs in Europe, she insists that the writer can be saved only by bringing the girl in the photograph to America. VERDICT Showing us how people use one another in an irredeemably violent world where the creation of art is morally neutral but finally the whole point, Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase) has written a sensational book. [See Prepub Alert, 1/5/15.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.