Rachel Lyon (1)

18 year old Cory has failed to get into college so has decided to work at a summer camp before making decisions about her future. At the end of the contract one of the parents offers her a job as a nanny. He's rich, powerful and paranoid about security so Cory signs an NDA and is whisked off to a private island. There she is kept in luxury and fed opiates whilst pressure is placed on her and she is not able to contact home. Cory's mother Emer is convinced her daughter is in danger and searches the Eastern seaboard whilst her professional life falls apart in her absence.
This is a very powerful retelling of the story of Persephone but with a really modern take. Hades is the CEO of a pharmaceutical company who feeds his captive with addictive drugs. Persephone is a vulnerable girl, already the victim of sexual assault, and Demeter is the Chair of an NGO trying to stop world hunger. All very 21st century and with '#me too' and a little hint of Epstein it's a potent mix. The plot struggles in places but I devored it in a few hours.… (meer)

Cody had a not-great senior year of high school, and the aftermath of that is that she wasn't accepted to any colleges. She did manage to get a summer job as a junior camp counselor at the camp she's spent every summer at, which is good, but when camp wraps up, she's not looking forward to returning home. Then, the father of one of her charges makes her the offer of a job as babysitter to his two kids for the rest of the summer, until they are returned to their mother. The job is on his private island, where there's no cell phone service, and she has to decide immediately and sign an NDA, but she decides to take the job.

Emer isn't having a great time, either, discovering on a trip to China, that the new rice varietal that the non-profit she heads has failed, leaving the farmers they'd enticed with promises of higher yields, left destitute. Now she's fighting to keep the non-profit afloat, to find a solution, and also getting a few vague texts from her daughter about an internship for an unspecified businessman, but receiving no answer to her own calls and texts. She decides that despite the turmoil at her workplace, she has no choice but to go find her daughter.

This is loosely structured on the story of Demeter and Persephone, and it's a lot of fun to see the elements of the myth arising in different guises. There are two entertwined stories here; a single mother's search for her daughter and the story of a very young woman who isn't sure what she wants to do with the next few years, let alone her life and how she feels her way towards maturity while existing in a place designed to thwart thought and reason.

Lyon writes with nuance and understanding from both the viewpoint of a directionless young woman and her over-extended mother, creating two characters in conflict but who also deeply love each other. She also manages to make Emer's fear for her daughter as she learns where she is and who she is with compelling and urgent while also showing Cory as curious and eager to be included in with the grown-ups. Lyon is juggling two different stories here and she does so in a way that makes both fascinating and real.… (meer)

There's a particular kind of character who just hits my sweet spot. A woman who makes a lot of bad decisions and ruins her own life is always interesting to read about; after all, what is fiction without conflict and what kind of conflict is more interesting than the stuff people bring on themselves? This novel features that main character. Lu is a young woman living in a terrible loft apartment in a sketchy part of Brooklyn in the nineties, before gentrification. She works at an expensive grocery store that allows her to pay her rent (most of the time) and buy film as she works on becoming a photographer. She is working on a series of self-portraits when it happens, she takes a truly great picture. Lu is sure that this is the key to getting her foot in the door of the art world, but who will she have to hurt to get her chance?

The very act of recall is like trying to photograph the sky. The infinite and ever-shifting colors of memory, its rippling light, cannot really be captured. Show someone who has never seen the sky a picture of the sky and you show them a picture of nothing.

This is a well-written debut novel that really captures a time and place, when if you were willing to live in a run down and rodent-infested space where the landlord is desperate to get people out, you could afford to live in New York. Where your neighbors could be people with serious issues or they could be artists using the space to create art. Self-Portrait with Boy is also a wonderful depiction of a person who longs to be an artist, to support herself with her pictures and to find a place within that milieu. I'm eager to read whatever Rachel Lyon writes next, even if it probably won't be exactly this book.… (meer)

This book was a surprise. Recommended by a friend, I had no idea what to expect and isn't that the fun of a new book/author? It appealed to me on several levels - the moral dilemma is intriguing (what would I do if.....?), the lonesome, loner main character was sad but intriguing, and the artistic backdrop and setting was interesting because of my own artistic endeavors.

"You know, I said, since the medium was invented, photography has been undervalued, thought of as a second-rate art form. People tend not to understand the technique involved. We can see the artistry in an excellent painting, can see it in the brushstrokes. In a photograph, the artist's touch is more invisible. Part of is is also that the nature of the photograph is to exist in multiples. The value of a painting or a sculpture is higher because there is just one painting, one sculpture in the world. Dealers can sell it for all this money because it's one-of-a-kind. Because a photograph can be reproduced again and again its value is inherently lower."

"When he (the professor) said, 'an accident is just a change of course', I got it. He meant the grace in making art is being alive to chance. 'When you make a mistake, make it again', he'd say. 'There are only happy accidents'". That is, until the accident that affects the rest of her life occurs......

Well written, smoothly flowing, well developed main characters, a recommended read - could be a good book club story.

… (meer)