Sleight

June 15, 2011

Poet and choreographer Kaschock imagines an art form called "sleight" in this inventive debut novel. The story stars sisters Clef and Lark Scrye, whose lives revolve around sleight composition and performance, and culminates in one ultimate, communal sleight performance, which is based on Lark's experiences with pain but shaped by the performers' reactions to a shocking local tragedy. Kaschock's work stands out for the originality of its concepts, narrative structure, and, particularly, language, as the author redefines words in relation to her art and boldly breaks from traditional grammatical constructions. Kaschock's intimate knowledge of dance is an asset, helping her bring the sleight performers vividly to life. VERDICT Not for the general reader, Sleight is to the traditional fiction narrative what alternative music is to mainstream pop. Readers who enjoy the challenge of an innovative, unconventional style will take pleasure in this selection.--Catherine Tingelstad, Pitt Community Coll. Lib., Greenville, NC

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
Siblings, mysterious billboard messages, maimed children and a bizarre art form coalesce, up to a point, in an unusual, dreamlike tale.

Choreographer/poet/novelist Kaschock constructs her debut around a new performance art form combining sound, movement and structures, called sleighting, and invents a new set of meanings to go with it: Needs, Souls, wicking, precursors all take on fresh connotations in a teasingly oblique story written in prose sometimes lyrical, sometimes clotted, requiring the retuning of the ear: "He saw darkness as necessary, a part of the scrutiny, the spelunking of sleight's potential." Two sisters, Clef and Lark, have performed sleight, although emotionally troubled Lark left the troupe. West, who runs a different troupe, has met Byrne, a gifted writer who carries a rock in memory of his hated father. As a new sleight work is assembled, a horrible serial killing comes to light, the Vogelsongs' ritual murder of some two dozen children, and this terror becomes woven into the new show. Kaschock's inventive but odd story is matched on the page by peculiar layouts, lists, script dialogue and footnotes. Gothic and intense, this fully imagined yet partly private work of storytelling loosely connects themes of pained childhood, eventually wrapping up some of them.

Powerfully original verging on the obfuscatory, this is a novel with no middle ground: Readers will either love or hate it.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 8, 2011
This muddled debut novel, though ostensibly about “sleight” (a fictional interdisciplinary art form combining dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word), provides no clear definition of sleight. That Kaschock, the author of two poetry collections (Unfathoms; A Beautiful Name for a Girl), never offers a clear visual of this practice is only one of the book’s many problems. Focusing on two sleightist sisters, Clef and Lark, the novel examines their troubled relationship, which is paralleled by the strained bond between two brothers, Byrne and Marvel. These four troubled sleightists are brought together by West, a less-than-scrupulous sleight director, in order to create an unorthodox sleight based on the tragic murder of 25 children. As the intense preparations for the performance collide with the legacies of past transgressions, the sleightists begin to fall apart, even as they increasingly come to feel that sleight offers their only chance at salvation. The reader may well feel some of the presumed contortions of sleight while attempting to make sense of this strenuously pretentious and humorless novel.