Scan barcode
kristinmarta's review
This one was not for me. It started out ok but then it got increasingly obtuse. So many characters but not really spending enough time with them or drawn with enough detail to care. There was so much attention to the sentences that I had no connection to any of the plot. I hate to use the word pretentious, but that is what comes to mind.
nlpatrick11's review
2.0
Won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. It sounded very intriguing. The writing itself is beautiful, but I found the story very difficult to follow.
sarah_tollok's review
5.0
I heard Lidia Yuknavitch speak about fiction and speculative fiction at the National Book Festival in 2022. I knew, just from how she talked about stories, that I would love her writing.
I don't say this lightly...I think this is my new favorite book on the planet.
The writing makes me weak in the knees. It's so very, very good. I want to wade into every line and be carried away with the tides of the imagery, the imagination, and the truth of this book. Her character Laisvė carries objects across time, through water, to those who need them. But she also carries stories, and histories. Stories are like water, they flow between and through us and in us. They make up our bodies and delineate our homelands. Our bodies, histories, and stories are all at once so intimately personal and intimately shared.
I'll stop trying to explain. What Lidia Yuknavitch did in Thrust transcends anything I could possibly try to say about it. Just thrust yourself into the stream of her words and let it carry you along.
I don't say this lightly...I think this is my new favorite book on the planet.
The writing makes me weak in the knees. It's so very, very good. I want to wade into every line and be carried away with the tides of the imagery, the imagination, and the truth of this book. Her character Laisvė carries objects across time, through water, to those who need them. But she also carries stories, and histories. Stories are like water, they flow between and through us and in us. They make up our bodies and delineate our homelands. Our bodies, histories, and stories are all at once so intimately personal and intimately shared.
I'll stop trying to explain. What Lidia Yuknavitch did in Thrust transcends anything I could possibly try to say about it. Just thrust yourself into the stream of her words and let it carry you along.
sarahkatelevy's review
5.0
Read this last week and can’t stop thinking about it. The world is changing rapidly. Pick this one up if you want your mind bent and your blood chilled and your heart ripped out.
binbinbin's review
adventurous
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
dumaurier's review
4.25
gorgeous prose and compelling characters even tho idek what was going on. fun time
tombuoni's review against another edition
An ambitious attempt to creatively reimagine the mythos of America, Thrust takes inspiration in the Statue of Liberty’s design, construction, and iconography and tells interweaving stories of the misfit laborers who made it, foretelling its conclusion in our national story. This book is a melting pot of historical fiction, magic realism, erotic coming-of-age fantasy, epistolary novel, time-travel romance, ethnographic memoir, and environmental dystopia. Some of these individual parts worked better for me than others, and I feel like there was plenty of self-indulgence and proselytizing along the way, but I did admire the overall project as an entertaining way to engage with a more cohesive and inclusive historical narrative.
As noted in the author’s Acknowledgements, Thrust is heavily indebted to Elizabeth Mitchell’s “Liberty’s Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty”. Looking forward to checking that out sometime to learn more.
A few highlights:
“What might have been: if the woman we built had been allowed to represent emancipation—broken chains in her hand, the original story, her form standing on the bones of the Indigenous killed there, not as a monument to killing, but as a reminder that the birth of this place carried death with it in a way we’d need to reckon with… What if that had been told as the story of America? Instead of the story that came?”
“Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there—our labor had put them there—and we had thoughts about it.”
“I keep thinking about the broken shackle, the way it was supposed to be prominently held in the statue’s hand for all to see—and how it ended up near her foot, like something hidden or disappeared. I keep thinking about how her skin changed from copper to green.”
“We were Jews and Italians and Lithuanians and Poles. We were Irish and Native American and Chinese. We were Lebanese and African and Mexican. We were Germans and Trinidadians and Scots. There were hundreds of us over time and across distances; it is impossible to say how many. We were an ocean of laborers. We spoke Russian and French and Italian and English and Chinese and Irish and Yiddish, Swahili and Lakota and Spanish and a swirl of dialects. Our languages a kind of anthem.”
“Sometimes newspaper stories would make their way to us. We read and heard many insults against her, even as we were still building her. One in particular stood out to me, from the Cleveland Gazette: “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and his family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.””
“The past gets buried like that, and then comes back when people least expect it. Like ice melting away. Or water rising. The Indigenous death toll in this land, where we are, was probably more than thirteen million, but that’s not the story that got told.””
“He produced an eye magnification device. He studied the penny. “You see this green coloration?” “Yes,” she said, their heads nearly touching. “That’s what happens when oxidation occurs between copper and air. Over time, copper turns green.” “Like the drowning statue,” Laisvė said. The statue was her favorite large object that lived in water. As she’d told him ten thousand times. “The drowned statue is made from thirty tons of copper,” she continued. “Enough to make more than four hundred and thirty million pennies.””
““Virtue” and “courage” and “knowledge” cannot take shape directly in stone or metal. Least of all “freedom.” By their very nature, concepts have no shape, design, or texture. They shoot the mind outward into space and time, leave it hanging there without traveling anywhere real. To make ideas visible, an artist must personify them, reduce them to a form recognizable to the beholder. Think of the Pietà, of the Venus de Milo. A mother’s sacred grief and love, or the so-called figure of desire. Yet in this project something made my imagination falter. Bodies like those are beautiful, but not right for the ideas. That is, until the first time I clapped eyes on the Winged Victory of Samothrace—and I dropped to the floor. I stared up at her, this headless, armless woman larger than life… For me, she conjured every idea—action, forward momentum, triumph—all in Thasian and Parian marble. In her body, the violence of motion meets a profound and eternal stillness. Before she lost her arms, her right arm was believed to have been raised, her hand cupped around her mouth to shout, Victory!”
“My three favorite paintings of the Fall of Man are Jan Brueghel de Oude and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man; Hendrick Goltzius, The Fall of Man; and Michelangelo, The Fall of Man. In that order. My choices are due to the arms and bodies of the women, although my most beloved of all has a singular feature that distinguishes it from the rest: the animals. In the shared gaze of Brueghel and Rubens, the humans are no more visually important than the animals and trees.”
““Why on earth should I swallow this creature?” A reasonable question, you might think, but even as I uttered it, I realized how unlike me it was. I felt immediately ashamed for my lack of courage—my lack of imagination.”
“Today she brings a treasure in the form of a poem by Emma Lazarus: The New Colossus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!””
“The story of workers is buried under the weight of every monument to progress or power. Our labor never reaches the height of the sacred. No one ever tells the story of how beautiful we were. How the body of us moved. How we lifted entire epochs. May our story survive the rise of this city.”
“The statue has been drowned now for a long time. As the tides ebb and flow, the tips of the torch are the only things still visible from what was once the colossus, the beacon, the icon of a nation.”
“The time of recognizable human beings is so tiny—too small to be visible against geologic time. Our lives, our history, our species, haven’t even come close to beginning. Your existence is not yet even recordable, not when you try to measure it against geologic time, against the Earth’s story of herself.”
— Thrust: A Novel by Lidia Yuknavitch
https://a.co/iYF52Rw
As noted in the author’s Acknowledgements, Thrust is heavily indebted to Elizabeth Mitchell’s “Liberty’s Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty”. Looking forward to checking that out sometime to learn more.
A few highlights:
“What might have been: if the woman we built had been allowed to represent emancipation—broken chains in her hand, the original story, her form standing on the bones of the Indigenous killed there, not as a monument to killing, but as a reminder that the birth of this place carried death with it in a way we’d need to reckon with… What if that had been told as the story of America? Instead of the story that came?”
“Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there—our labor had put them there—and we had thoughts about it.”
“I keep thinking about the broken shackle, the way it was supposed to be prominently held in the statue’s hand for all to see—and how it ended up near her foot, like something hidden or disappeared. I keep thinking about how her skin changed from copper to green.”
“We were Jews and Italians and Lithuanians and Poles. We were Irish and Native American and Chinese. We were Lebanese and African and Mexican. We were Germans and Trinidadians and Scots. There were hundreds of us over time and across distances; it is impossible to say how many. We were an ocean of laborers. We spoke Russian and French and Italian and English and Chinese and Irish and Yiddish, Swahili and Lakota and Spanish and a swirl of dialects. Our languages a kind of anthem.”
“Sometimes newspaper stories would make their way to us. We read and heard many insults against her, even as we were still building her. One in particular stood out to me, from the Cleveland Gazette: “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and his family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.””
“The past gets buried like that, and then comes back when people least expect it. Like ice melting away. Or water rising. The Indigenous death toll in this land, where we are, was probably more than thirteen million, but that’s not the story that got told.””
“He produced an eye magnification device. He studied the penny. “You see this green coloration?” “Yes,” she said, their heads nearly touching. “That’s what happens when oxidation occurs between copper and air. Over time, copper turns green.” “Like the drowning statue,” Laisvė said. The statue was her favorite large object that lived in water. As she’d told him ten thousand times. “The drowned statue is made from thirty tons of copper,” she continued. “Enough to make more than four hundred and thirty million pennies.””
““Virtue” and “courage” and “knowledge” cannot take shape directly in stone or metal. Least of all “freedom.” By their very nature, concepts have no shape, design, or texture. They shoot the mind outward into space and time, leave it hanging there without traveling anywhere real. To make ideas visible, an artist must personify them, reduce them to a form recognizable to the beholder. Think of the Pietà, of the Venus de Milo. A mother’s sacred grief and love, or the so-called figure of desire. Yet in this project something made my imagination falter. Bodies like those are beautiful, but not right for the ideas. That is, until the first time I clapped eyes on the Winged Victory of Samothrace—and I dropped to the floor. I stared up at her, this headless, armless woman larger than life… For me, she conjured every idea—action, forward momentum, triumph—all in Thasian and Parian marble. In her body, the violence of motion meets a profound and eternal stillness. Before she lost her arms, her right arm was believed to have been raised, her hand cupped around her mouth to shout, Victory!”
“My three favorite paintings of the Fall of Man are Jan Brueghel de Oude and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man; Hendrick Goltzius, The Fall of Man; and Michelangelo, The Fall of Man. In that order. My choices are due to the arms and bodies of the women, although my most beloved of all has a singular feature that distinguishes it from the rest: the animals. In the shared gaze of Brueghel and Rubens, the humans are no more visually important than the animals and trees.”
““Why on earth should I swallow this creature?” A reasonable question, you might think, but even as I uttered it, I realized how unlike me it was. I felt immediately ashamed for my lack of courage—my lack of imagination.”
“Today she brings a treasure in the form of a poem by Emma Lazarus: The New Colossus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!””
“The story of workers is buried under the weight of every monument to progress or power. Our labor never reaches the height of the sacred. No one ever tells the story of how beautiful we were. How the body of us moved. How we lifted entire epochs. May our story survive the rise of this city.”
“The statue has been drowned now for a long time. As the tides ebb and flow, the tips of the torch are the only things still visible from what was once the colossus, the beacon, the icon of a nation.”
“The time of recognizable human beings is so tiny—too small to be visible against geologic time. Our lives, our history, our species, haven’t even come close to beginning. Your existence is not yet even recordable, not when you try to measure it against geologic time, against the Earth’s story of herself.”
— Thrust: A Novel by Lidia Yuknavitch
https://a.co/iYF52Rw
suannelaqueur's review
5.0
Oh. My. God. This. Book.
I borrowed it as a joke, because my son and I have a little riff about the word “thrust.” I showed him the title and laughed, “I have to read this on principle, I’m going in blind...”
Holy crap. Within 5% I had a feeling it would be the best read of 2024. Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it “the most mind-blowing book about America I’ve ever read” and I whole-heartedly agree. It starts with building the statue of liberty and ends in a detention facility along the US border. What happens in between is magic. It’s about migration. Emigration. Immigration. Objects and people and stories moving between time and countries and gender. It’s about love. Power. Oppression. Survival. It’s about liberty.
I borrowed it as a joke, because my son and I have a little riff about the word “thrust.” I showed him the title and laughed, “I have to read this on principle, I’m going in blind...”
Holy crap. Within 5% I had a feeling it would be the best read of 2024. Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it “the most mind-blowing book about America I’ve ever read” and I whole-heartedly agree. It starts with building the statue of liberty and ends in a detention facility along the US border. What happens in between is magic. It’s about migration. Emigration. Immigration. Objects and people and stories moving between time and countries and gender. It’s about love. Power. Oppression. Survival. It’s about liberty.
bug_not_a_feature's review
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
Very nonlinear and poetic. Not everyone’s cup of tea. Was a little too light on the world building for my taste
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape