The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women, edited by Rosalie Morales Kearns
by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews the most recent release from feminist press Shade Mountain Press.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell is the author of the novels Frieda’s Song (2021) and The Bowl with Gold Seams (2016, winner of the Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction), as well as the short story collections Known By Heart (2020) and Contents Under Pressure (2016, nominated for the National Book Award). Her short fiction has been featured in numerous journals, including The Massachusetts Review and The MacGuffin. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her essays and reviews appear in Fiction Writers Review, where she is a contributing editor, the Washington Independent Review of Books, The New York Journal of Books, and others.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews the most recent release from feminist press Shade Mountain Press.
“With her customary depth, compassion, and wit, Hadley explores the vexations of togetherness and separateness, the puzzle of core individual and family identity.”
“The events of 9/11 are integral to the novel’s structure and meaning, and to the Amendola family’s history and identity, but neither novel nor family are defined or constrained by the event.”
“Every character in this book works,” writes Ellen Prentiss Campbell in her review of this new book. “Among the greatest pleasures of reading this novel is Freud’s detailed and well-integrated research into the truly labor-intensive life of a seaside village in 1914.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Anne Tyler’s newest novel: “Some fault her for sentiment or repetition, some find her characters too similarly marked by eccentricities of behavior and occupation. But others, like myself, believe authentic sentiment gets a bad rap, and recognize her people. Behind the public curtains, whose family, what profession, isn’t a little odd?”
“Accept the slightly soft focus and it becomes part of the charm of Gaynor’s particular book”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on the pleasures of reading Hazel Gaynor’s historical novel A Memory of Violets.
In her review of Marilynne Robinson’s newest novel, Lila, Ellen Prentiss Campbell writes of the author’s work, “all four of Robinson’s novels—Housekeeping as well as the Gilead trilogy—are united by her compassionate attention to the possibility for amazing, transcendent grace breaking through and illuminating flawed human existence and our daily experience.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell says of Robert Hellenga’s new novel: “The greatest charm of this book is Frances herself, her tart, funny voice. Hellenga’s characters are flawed, striving, likeable. Frances Godwin may be my favorite of the whole tribe.”
“. . .these two groups of women are indeed sisters under the skin, and these authors are sisters as well.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on connecting Nesbit and Otsuka through their use of first-person plural.
Given the vast quantity of Alice/Carroll-inspired work, the reader might wonder: “Is there anything new to add?” Here, happily, Seabrook proves it is still possible to make an original contribution.
