Violet

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I enjoyed Scott Thomas debut novel so I was really looking forward to this one. It bought a fresh take on the haunted house narrative and had plenty of great set pieces, twists, and turns. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for this, his second novel. Unfortunately, Violet wasn’t my cup of tea, but I respect the fact that he is not afraid to experiment and go in a drastically different direction in his sophomore novel. That is always something I appreciate in any artist. And I plan on continuing to read anything he puts out. This sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century. We follow, in approximately alternating chapters (sometimes the story stays with a character) the storylines of two Violets.

Motherhood here is a bodily experience for one Violet and disorientingly disembodied for the other. Alex Hyde works as a lecturer in gender studies, and some of the troubled ambivalences of feminism are at the book’s heart. How can we as feminists honour miscarriage as the loss of a child, while also insisting that an aborted foetus is not actually a child? How can we both insist on the right of a single, impoverished woman such as Violet to be a mother while also insisting on her right not to mother the eight-month-old baby she gives up? There’s a kind of tender grace in Hyde’s writing – in its attentiveness to moment-by-moment bodily experience – that allows her to create a novelistic world open to all these questions and possibilities, without making any of it explicitly political.She imagined the road ending without warning, driving over the edge, plummeting into an infinite nothingness, until her screams became a song for the darkness.”

English governess: "She had straw-like blond hair, and that skin as transparent as rice paper, that girls from cold countries sometimes have, which over time become spotted and mercilessly wrinkled."

Even as Kris tried to keep the unpleasant memories of her past mentally buried, it's felt through all of her thoughts, words, and actions. The town she recalls from her youth has changed, and yet it's like a psychological puzzle that she no longer has all the pieces to. Secondly, in its nuanced exploration of motherhood. A view informed by the author’s own experience (starting after the birth of her first child in 2014 and finished after the birth of, I think, her fourth in 2021), but also by her research and teaching specialty on gender and “the ways in which women’s productive and reproductive labour is incorporated into nation-building projects through the institutions of marriage and the family.” – not just through the two main characters but by other characters around them including friends and fellow hospital-internees, we see various aspects of societal expectations around pregnancy during and after the second world war. What I liked most about Violet is the pervading sense of loss. Which typing it out feels depressing. But it's honestly not. It's about surviving loss, about life hitting you with the worst it has and finding a way to live on, to cope, to overcome.

Violeta" was published in January 2022 and on August 2nd of this same year, Isabel Allende will be celebrating her 80th birthday. She continues to lead a remarkable life! My aunt will be 90 years old next month and the family is planning a birthday celebration- filled with photo family slides - and 90 years of storytelling - a family gathering feast of love for the greatest Auntie Jeanne in the world. There is a mystery set in regards to location. The exact country in South America is not stated. However, the geographical descriptions and historical facts give hints where it might be happening.Scott Thomas has it in for Kansas. His debut novel, the acclaimed Kill Creek, took place in a haunted house in Kansas' rural countryside, and the author has returned to his native Sunflower State for his second standalone novel, Violet. There, however, the similarities end. Where Kill Creek was a meta-commentary on horror authors and their chosen genre, Violet is a direct, affecting, and psychologically thrilling slice of Midwestern gothic.