Winter 2019 – Page 3 – The Greene Street Review

Yiyun Li Grapples with Loss in “Where Reasons End”

Cover of "Where Reasons End" by Yiyun Li

By Freddy Caione

Yiyun Li, in her most recent novel, “Where Reasons End,” delves into the pain of losing her 16-year-old son to suicide. Narrated by a mother whose son has recently taken his own life, this heartfelt book becomes the only remaining medium through which Li can converse with her child. Li writes, “We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing It over again, this time by words.” She creates a moment outside of the liminal journey of life towards death in order to convey a world outside of time – “a world made up by words, and words only. No images, no sounds.”

The Power of Sex: C.S. Pacat’s “Captive Prince”

By Oliver Fosten Book cover of Captive Prince

It’s easy to expect a quick, smutty novel when picking up “Captive Prince” by C.S. Pacat, the first of a series comprised of three books and four short stories. Beyond the usual warning on the jacket that the book is for mature audiences only, the dramatis personae make it explicitly clear how central dominant and submissive dynamics are to the plot. Let’s not kid ourselves here: this novel is about sex, just not in the way I was remotely expecting. There’s no ripping off of lacy shirts or questionable absence of lube just as there are no tender embraces or rough moments of unhinged passion. Nope, all the horizontal monster-mashing here is about control, gain, and putting more at risk than just the well-being of your genitals.

The Gut-Punch of “Conversation With Friends”

Cover of "Conversations With Friends" by Sally Rooney

By Alice Gelber

“I’m just not very emotional,” says Frances, the cool and somewhat masochistic narrator of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, “Conversations With Friends.” To this, her best friend, and ex-girlfriend, Bobbi, responds, “I don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have.” While Frances spends much of “Conversations with Friends convincing us that she is detached, impersonal, and unfeeling, every line of Rooney’s first novel feels like a punch, leaving the reader drained, but somehow begging for more. Her spartan sentences and nonchalant dialogue–free from quotation marks–disguise the torturous emotional undercurrent that runs through the novel. And, like Frances, the narrative moves with the pain, sometimes enjoying it, sometimes despising it, but always submitting to it.