Erin reviewed Celia's song by Lee Maracle
Review of "Celia's song" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I did this book a bit of a disservice in the last 50 pages trying to read it with conversation going on around me… so I definitely missed some things. But I still felt it was a really good read.
There’s a pivotal shift in the middle of the book. It goes from slow and meandering to kind of manic. The second half is easy to get sucked into. I can’t decide if I’d prefer the tension to be more spread through the whole book or if this half and half approach worked fine. It does feel balanced, so maybe it’s fine!
I struggled a bit to keep track of the characters but it didn’t matter too much how they were all related - it mattered that they were a family and a community dealing with old and new crises. I very much enjoyed that.
I wasn’t sure how to …
I did this book a bit of a disservice in the last 50 pages trying to read it with conversation going on around me… so I definitely missed some things. But I still felt it was a really good read.
There’s a pivotal shift in the middle of the book. It goes from slow and meandering to kind of manic. The second half is easy to get sucked into. I can’t decide if I’d prefer the tension to be more spread through the whole book or if this half and half approach worked fine. It does feel balanced, so maybe it’s fine!
I struggled a bit to keep track of the characters but it didn’t matter too much how they were all related - it mattered that they were a family and a community dealing with old and new crises. I very much enjoyed that.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about the event in the middle of the book because it was just so awful, but I thought Maracle used the event in the best way. She explores colonialism and white supremacy by contrasting how the Sto:lo community chooses to handle the crisis with the way white people expect it to be handled. And I think she really challenges the reader with this extreme scenario.
The writing style mostly worked for me because it was concise and clear, but there were so many short, simple sentences and clauses I almost felt like I was walking down a steep hill - pushed along faster than I even wanted to go. And I’m a fast reader!
There’s also some magical realism elements here (if it’s appropriate to call it that) that I really enjoyed. That’s my favorite kind of contemporary fiction.