The Juice
The Juice is an online publication featuring writing on writing. This includes craft essays, book reviews, literacy narratives, interviews, scholarly essays on literature, and cross-disciplinary conversations. Submit your work on Submittable.
In the Shadow of the Mother: The Politics of Family in Maeve Brennan’s “The Visitor”
The Visitor revolves around the young Anastasia King returning to Dublin from Paris after the death of her mother who ran away from her husband six years prior (Brennan). Throughout the story, Brennan writes about many different familial relationships that have great impact on Anastasia and the King family. The story particularly focuses on four parent-child/grandparent-grandchild relationships that revolve around isolationism and the destruction of the family. Angie Henderson, Sandra Harmon, and Harmony Newman write that families “exist in two spheres, both public and private.” This necessitates the considering of the public expectation of gender roles (Henderson, et. al. 512). Although the Irish Free State seriously restricted the public role of women, there was still a public expectation on them to be perfect mothers.
There Is No Refuge: A Review of Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy
The Unworthy is undoubtedly horror—tension and fear permeate every page, along with death and cruelty and cockroaches—but by setting the story in a combined tech-climate disaster, Bazterrica pulls a strong current of science fiction in as well, playing on the globe’s most pressing anxieties, and the two genres only heighten each other. Horror is the art of emotional manipulation. Science fiction is, as Ray Bradbury coined it, the art of the possible.
Scary Poppins
Reading this psychological novel feels a lot like holding your breath. In it, there is an ever-present sense of evil and violence; a presence that would be minimized if the violent climax was actually depicted. In her withholding, Slimani expertly disconnects the known and the suggested, allowing her abundant foreshadowing to fill in the space that she leaves.
Breakage and Silence: the Poetry of Under Flag by Myung Mi Kim in Times of Global Crisis
Silence, like its close friend death, is unavoidable, and it comes and goes as it pleases. It quietly haunts the borders of meaning, lurking in the subtle folds of symbolism, waiting for the words to fade, allowing itself to sink back into the comforting realm of perplexity and incomprehension in pages that feel “crowded” with blank space. Silence in these poems reveals more than it conceals, and in its death-like quality, it envisages the catastrophe of the linguistic trauma of bodies that migrate to survive amidst war and seek a utopia, always on the verge of oblivion.
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