Book Review: Black Iris by Leah Raeder
May. 11th, 2016 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaTitle: Black Iris
Author: Leah Raeder
Published: New York: Atria, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 188,410
Text Number: 553
Read Because: queer author/content, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: As she enters college, troubled teenager Laney falls in with a pair of friends in the party scene. An aggressively unreliable narrator means the plot it not what it first seems; the non-linear narrative can be difficult to keep straight and is overtly contrived, and the scale is exaggerated, too intense and too smart—a stylization echoed in the lush, harsh language, psychological insights, promiscuity and drug use, and violent interpersonal dynamics. But also present are queer characters and relationships, power dynamics, obsession, vengeance, mental illness, poetry, and love. Black Iris is something in between Dangerous Liaisons, urban fantasy of manners, and a harsher Francesca Lia Block, and in larger quantity, I'd find it exhausting—but in this one novel, which is compulsively readable and a victorious labor of love, it's phenomenal.
Author: Leah Raeder
Published: New York: Atria, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 188,410
Text Number: 553
Read Because: queer author/content, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: As she enters college, troubled teenager Laney falls in with a pair of friends in the party scene. An aggressively unreliable narrator means the plot it not what it first seems; the non-linear narrative can be difficult to keep straight and is overtly contrived, and the scale is exaggerated, too intense and too smart—a stylization echoed in the lush, harsh language, psychological insights, promiscuity and drug use, and violent interpersonal dynamics. But also present are queer characters and relationships, power dynamics, obsession, vengeance, mental illness, poetry, and love. Black Iris is something in between Dangerous Liaisons, urban fantasy of manners, and a harsher Francesca Lia Block, and in larger quantity, I'd find it exhausting—but in this one novel, which is compulsively readable and a victorious labor of love, it's phenomenal.
"It is who you are. Doctors talk about it like it’s this separate thing, like a cold or a flu. Something that can be cured without curing your personality, your uniqueness, your spirit. They don’t understand. It shapes us so much that it’s more like a scar, a deformity, on the inside where they can’t see."
