E book Evaluate: Coming-of-age meets quarter-life disaster in Fiona Warnick’s bold debut ‘The Skunks’
Often after I see a guide described as an “bold debut” I learn it as a cop-out. Isn’t a debut inherently bold? What does that even imply?
“The Skunks” is what which means. And Fiona Warnick makes it look easy.
A coming-of-age novel with a quarter-life-crisis thrown in, “The Skunks” is advised in a stream of consciousness with a cynical form of oddball humor that is fully Warnick’s personal. Studying “The Skunks” is like consuming a cool glass of water on a sizzling summer season day — it’s nothing significantly earth-shattering, but it surely’s wholly essential, gratifying and gone earlier than you recognize it.
The story is basically advised from Isabel’s perspective. She’s a latest school grad who has returned to her hometown with no actual plans for the long run. And someday, whereas house-sitting, she sees three child skunks within the yard. The proper antidote to her obsession with boys: an obsession with skunks.
Isabel’s simply attempting to do higher in a world buzzing with diametrically opposing views of what which means. Her days are interspersed with fairytale-like skunk chapters. You possibly can take the secondary story of the skunks as one thing that is occurring alongside Isabel’s story, or as one thing Isabel is writing to higher make sense of her personal life. It is also doable that it is only a actually pretty story from the perspective of a skunk, which so occurs to intersect sometimes with a human named Isabel.
The result’s an unabashedly sincere character research, humanizing and equalizing, wherein skunks are simply as a lot part of the story as folks. And by the top of it, you’ll be able to’t assist however have a brand new appreciation for each species.
It’s bizarre. It’s contemporary. It’s a giant guess that folks will go alongside for this experience. In a phrase, it’s bold. And it pays off.
Warnick peppers the story with contemporary imagery, similes and metaphors: Isabel describes her good friend as having an inner rain gauge that’s at all times full, whereas everybody else’s leaks, leaving them craving a thunderstorm. The writer additionally has a knack for contrasting literary magnificence with the on a regular basis, like when she describes the skunks’ tails swishing in unison “like a ballet, or a windshield wiper.”
The novel is stuffed with moments which might be profound regardless of their mundanity — or could possibly be profound for those who take a look at it metaphorically — or simply random ideas and moments, a mild ribbing of the reader for looking for that means in each element.
However, for those who can simply sit again and revel in it, the pages breeze by nearly with out discover. Warnick’s clean fashion and the dearth of formal construction make the free-flow story fly by such as you’ve been swept up in a jet move.
Who knew a quarter-life disaster could possibly be so partaking and pleasant? Who knew Skunks have been so charming and considerate? This guide handed like a dream, and was over earlier than I knew it.
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