JUSTINE

JUSTINE BY FORSYTH HARMON

Justine, an illustrated novel written and drawn by Forsyth Harmon, is an intimate, little thing meant to be swallowed whole. We meet Ali just as she falls into the cavern that is Justine, the girl behind the counter at the Stop & Shop. Throughout Justine, Ali intensely studies the titular character’s embodied chaos through the lens of longing, and while this is the engine of the book, it is a quiet one, because this isn’t just a story about the sexuality of a teenage girl: it is about all the forces leaning in on her, bending her toward self-destruction.

Though Justine seems to envelop this story, it is Ali who we know intimately, whose supremely adolescent existence burns quietly on the page, while Justine remains something akin to a spiteful phantom, thrashing around and breaking things, but doing little to prove her existence. For Ali, though, the slightest contact with Justine leaves a deep impression, evidenced by a rapidly-developing eating disorder and a newfound penchant for shoplifting.

Forsyth Harmon’s sweet illustrations lend a strangely immediate nostalgia to the experience of reading—as though we’re looking through the scrapbook of a life, simple objects and small moments gleaming with importance. It is fitting, then, how defined this book is by its era, the 90’s serving as just as much a setting as Long Island for these teens.

I’ll forgive Harmon the rude punch that ends the book (no spoilers) for the charm that emanates from its pages and for my satisfaction with the way it is cut off right at the moment where many storytellers would lean in. Harmon is not concerned with punchy plot points, sentimentality, or wise commentary. The result is a book so intimate it feels wrong to read—something deeply honest, and painfully relatable.

Tin House.

—Review by Lucy Shapiro

THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH

THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH BY PRIYANKA CHAMPANERI

Banaras, India, a city on the banks of the Ganges, is a sacred place for Hindus, where the souls of the dead may pass on, released at last from the cycle of reincarnation. It is here that Pramesh Prasad has lived for ten years, an outsider who escaped the family farm for the city, and who serves as manager of Shankarbhavan, a hostel that houses the dying. Pramesh lives a life of focus and routine with his wife, Shobha, and his daughter, Rani, tending to the needs of the families who accompany their ailing loved ones, until the day a body is found in the holy river that looks uncannily like Pramesh. What follows is an astounding mystery in which nothing cooperates as it should—not even the dead.

In his daily duties at the bhavan, Pramesh has always marveled at how the souls around him “would soon slip out of their bodies as easily as he slipped out of one shirt and changed into another.” But in Priyanka Champaneri’s debut novel The City of Good Death, nothing is so easy, and memory proves as persistent as a lingering spirit “determined to be heard,” holding tight to the living until fulfilling its purpose.

This novel could be seen as one cleaved in two, with mysteries unfolding discreetly in the realms of women and of men, and Champaneri deftly balances the weight of expectation and introspection, of skepticism and faith, and what is sought out and what is hidden. As the city stirs with gossip and intrigue, Pramesh and Shobha deal with hauntings of all kinds, their stories weaving around one another to reveal the intersection of love and grief, and perhaps even illuminating some of the mysteries of the Land of the Dead.

Restless Books.

—Review by Lucy Shapiro

REEL BAY: A CINEMATIC ESSAY

REEL BAY: A CINEMATIC ESSAY BY JANA LARSON

Filmmaker and writer Jana Larson’s book-length essay Reel Bay is a captivating blend of memoir, true-crime, meditation on women in film, and fantasy played out through the pages of screenplays that will never be completed.

The story follows Jana, a grad student struggling to finish her MFA in filmmaking, as she tries to piece together the life of Takako Konishi, a young Japanese woman found dead in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Jana travels first to the Midwest to interview witnesses—where she finds she’s trailing just behind a BBC film crew researching the same case—and ultimately to Japan, where the once-clear image of Takako seems irreparably obscured.

What begins as a cataloguing of a ravenous, journalistic hunt becomes a mesmerizing exercise in projection and subjectivity, as Jana’s obsession with the case becomes less and less rational. A search for answers moves far afield while painfully circling the same set of circumstances: a dead girl in the woods, two champagne bottles, a hand-drawn map, and a letter prophesying her death. But Jana is a centrifuge that fails to separate truth from speculation, reality from fantasy, and her search collapses spectacularly into questions that are increasingly unanswerable.

With this essay, Larson captures both the fanaticism of creative fixation and the listlessness of artistic existential dread with clarity and empathy. “How did she become so lost?” she asks, not only about herself, or even Takako. As we are told from the beginning of the book, “you are the woman in this scene,” and indeed this is a story about any woman who, as Larson puts it, “doesn’t have the equipment to make her life work.” There is something inherently defiant in Larson’s exploration of those who are lost and deluded, and something freeing in bearing witness as she becomes the true subject of her art.

Coffee House Press.

—Review by Lucy Shapiro