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Amazon Guest Review of “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” by Karen Russell
By Alena Graedon
Alena Graedon was born in Durham, North Carolina, and is a graduate of Brown University and the Columbia MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her first novel is The Word Exchange.
The characters in this numinous, electrifying, brilliantly imaginative collection undergo monstrous and miraculous transformations. Vampires morph from old Italian grandfathers to bats to vampires again. Boys turn into mute, mutant scarecrows. Girls metamorphose into kaiko-joko: silkworm caterpillars and slaves.
As these changes take place, the line between human and inhuman can seem vanishingly faint. But there are also subtler kinds of transmutations. Bad-luck boys reinvent themselves, with the help of hair dye and rapacious birds who hoard human destinies as scraps in an old tree.
Having the chance to visit each variegated world that Russell conjures—and the sublime words she uses to describe them—is more than reason enough to read these eight very moving, often very funny stories. But the thing that makes them especially mesmerizing and powerful is how profoundly human Russell’s monsters seem.
Implanted in each of their shape-shifting bodies are very familiar things: bloodlust, hunger, superstition, devastating memories, fictions we tell ourselves to go on living. But also buried inside are secret selves, strength, love, salvational creativity. For the characters to transform, these things often have to be wrenched out of them. And these extractions can lead not just to metamorphosis but sometimes to a sort of fusion.
At its best, reading, too, is a kind of fusion. Reading these stories, I felt as if many other lives, monstrous and human, had been poured into mine. But they also stirred my own thoughts and memories, creating something new. In the process, like Russell’s characters, I felt transformed.
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Large print edition - About very good a copy which may have some shelf or reading wear. May be age toned or lightly soiled. Pages and block mostly clean. May have previous owner markings within. In great reading condition. Tight binding. No jacket as published. May be ex library with appropriate markings and stamps. Seller Inventory # 811
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.15. Seller Inventory # G1410457982I3N10
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.15. Seller Inventory # G1410457982I3N00
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Missing dust jacket; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.15. Seller Inventory # G1410457982I3N11
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.15. Seller Inventory # G1410457982I3N10
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.15. Seller Inventory # G1410457982I3N00
Book Description Hardcover. Seller Inventory # Abebooks367505