Nina MacLaughlin

This past Spring, I taught a unit on contemporary feminist re-imaginings of the Classics and I sincerely wish I could have included Wake, Siren in my syllabus, as Nina MacLaughlin's retellings of tales from The Metamorphoses were as unflinching, cathartic, and ferociously feminist as I'd hoped they would be.

Fair warning: this is often a difficult read due to its explicit handling of sexual violence (given the source material, however, and the project undertaken by Wake, Siren, that was not a surprise for me) and MacLaughlin's prose is experimental, so if that isn't your bag, you may not enjoy this. That said, I appreciated MacLaughlin's style choices, as her beautiful, haunting prose, for me, comes the closest of any classics reimagining that I have read to truly capturing the primal, dreamlike experience of reading the ancients and Ovid in particular.

Some of the tales are stronger than others, but, on the whole, I found Wake, Siren a powerful collection performing interesting and important cultural work by reorienting the perspectives of many of the ravishings of The Metamorphoses (which several of Wake, Siren's heroines point out have been troublingly romanticized by Western culture for centuries) from the perspective of those brutalized by husbands, fathers, and the ever-capricious gods.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.… (lisätietoja)

This is not your average "I drastically changed my career" story. Yes, Nina MacLaughlin did go from being a writer for a weekly magazine to working as a carpenter. Even though carpentry is very concrete manual work and writing very cerebral. MacLaughlin learns many spiritual life lessons while learning carpentry, and describes her much coveted writing job as "clicking in front of a screen". She dwells on the history of certain carpenter's tools and what famous writers have said about them. She quotes Ovid and Garcia Marquez to name a few.
I loved her descriptions of the people she meets: owners of the homes she works on, fellow workers and some family members, and crazy situations she lands in. Above all I really felt MacLaughlin's admiration and love for her boss and mentor, Mary.
Basic tools are the titles of the chapters, such as "Hammer", "Screwdriver" and "Level". Each tool is also a metaphor for a piece of self discovery the author experiences.… (lisätietoja)