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    Nine Island
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    Nine Island
    Unavailable
    Nine Island
    Ebook236 pages3 hours

    Nine Island

    By Jane Alison

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016

    “Nine Island is a crackling incantation, brittle and brilliant and hot and sad and full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

    Nine Island is an intimate autobiographical novel, told by J, a woman who lives in a glass tower on one of Miami Beach’s lush Venetian Islands. After decades of disaster with men, she is trying to decide whether to withdraw forever from romantic love. Having just returned to Miami from a monthlong reunion with an old flame, Sir Gold,” and a visit to her fragile mother, J begins translating Ovid’s magical stories about the transformations caused by Eros. A woman who wants, a man who wants nothing. These two have stalked the world for thousands of years,” she thinks.

    When not ruminating over her sexual past and current fantasies, in the company of only her aging cat, J observes the comic, sometimes steamy goings-on among her faded-glamour condo neighbors. One of them, a caring nurse, befriends her, eventually offering the opinion that if you retire from love . . . then you retire from life.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateAug 22, 2016
    ISBN9781936787272
    Unavailable
    Nine Island
    Author

    Jane Alison

    Jane Alison is the author of The Love-Artist and The Marriage of the Sea. She lives in Germany.

    Read more from Jane Alison

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    Reviews for Nine Island

    3.5/5

    25 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Too sloppy, unstructured and all over the place for my taste, both in story and art. Just when I'd start to get interested in a section it would abruptly end and the story would go flying off in a whole different direction, never to return, leaving me unsatisfied. I don't feel the stories of the grandmother, mother and daughter were interwoven well enough to gel into a singular work. I'd have preferred separate volumes about the daughter and grandmother with stronger focus on each. (The mother sort of falls through the cracks and didn't leave much of an impression on me.)
    • 4/5
      This autobiographical graphic novel, tells the tale of three generations of women, including the author. The stand-out here is the author's grandmother, was able to escape from a concentration camp as a young girl and survives the war on her own daring and wits. Plus, she is such a hoot and a free spirit, as an aged woman, telling her story. This is a wonderful family memoir- funny, sad ,insightful and nicely illustrated.
    • 2/5
      I wish I would have liked this better. It was an #LMPBC read otherwise I would have DNFed it. It’s a story of a young lady, her jewish-ness, her mother, her grandmother, and the Holocaust. At its heart I feel this book wants to be Maus. It even references Maus, but it is such a lackluster comparison. Much of the story is Amy trying to decide what customs and activities of jewish life are relevant to her, while living with childhood anxiety, an overbearing mother, and the weight of her flighty grandmothers stories. Amy has this want and drive to collect and tell her grandmother’s stories, I just wish she would have taken herself out of the equation.Amy switches time periods and locations with no notice and it is hard to tell. There is not break. You can tell her grandmother’s story of surviving the war apart from everything else from not only how it was worded but also how it was typeset. But everything else mashes together like peas carrots and mashed potatoes. But the potatoes are burnt and it ruins the entire thing. I really wish the author had taken a chronological approach. Her story of finding her Jewishness was interesting. Her story with her overbearing and analytical mother was interesting. Grandmother’s stories were interesting. But they should have been separated, and a better timeline flow should have been seen to.While many love this book, I do not. And that is okay. Others see things I don’t and vice versa. For someone this will hold the thrill and passion that I found in Maus. And for them I am happy.
    • 3/5
      Pro: no panels so storybook feel, captured joy/weight of Jewish intellectual heritageCon: floppy lines I couldn’t get lost in
    • 4/5
      This memoir focuses on the author’s grandmother and mother, both complicated, fascinating women who hover over Amy and give her no peace, as much as she adores and depends on them. Bubbe is a Holocaust survivor, and her story alone could fill a book (and probably should have). Sonya is an academic and a therapist, with strange obsessions of her own and is seemingly the only parent involved in Amy’s upbringing. And Amy is seemingly conflicted by everything - she's a child hypochondriac, a Jew who questions Israel's role in Palestine, and she shrugs off her Stanford education. I'm not sure of what makes this graphic novel less endearing than it should be. It could be the omissions - Amy is a dance teacher, though there's barely no mention of how she trained and teaches. She's also the daughter of globally recognized technologist Ray Kurzweil and makes no mention of him in her childhood memories. The only clue about her romantic life is a crush on a high school classmate. As Alison Bechdel wrote one book about her father and one book about her mother, and then a book about herself, perhaps Amy should have done the same. What’s here is good (the writing far better than the art) but there’s just not enough of the author in it.Quote: “The women in my family have certain stories to tell. Why does it feel like I’m not the protagonist of my own life?”