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A review by felixritt
On Sundays, She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield
5.0
Stunning, thought-provoking, and visceral, Scholfield's prose (which are lush: delicious and nauseating) are matched in mastery only by their character work--the characters of Jude and Nemoira, and the overwhelming relationship between them, are among the finest and most complicated ever explored. These are women who invent themselves (and reinvent themselves) on the page before us; we meet Jude at the lowest point in her life, an empty shell of her mother's (and by extension, society's--white society's, as Jude is a Black woman) design, and stay with her for decades as she tends to her house and her garden, her own self image and all that it touches, with care. On Sundays is a horror narrative, and the horror is as exquisite as it is upsetting--upsetting in the sense that it upsets the acceptable, the expected, the pre-approved tracks of modern horror and does something entirely new even as it occasionally evokes past masters and gothic greats--but it is also a celebration of the deliberate passage of time. One of the most evocative lines of the novel (and there are many) describes Jude reclaiming her upbringing. "Singing, keeping house, keeping herself, cooking, sewing--these things once brought on hurts too hurtful to voice, and now she did them thoughtfully, joyfully." (Scholfield 88) The intent implied by this quote, Jude's careful, stubborn determination, seems to honor something so rarely celebrated in our fast-paced "grind" culture, yet this is consistently Jude's approach: to her new life, to the stewardship of the tainted land they sell her, to her tentative relationship with Nemoira. While Nemoira also reinvents herself before our eyes (and in fact, the scene in which we are given access to the Bear's mind is one of the novel's most chilling), it is this steady, well-defined purpose that Jude comes to embody which throws their respective responses to lifetimes of mistreatment and alienation at odds, and in the conclusion to this conflict, where Jude not only survives, but does so with her convictions--wonderfully complicated by the question of what she owes to a society which has largely ignored and aided in her abuse--intact does the heart of Scholfield's emotional endeavor shine.
At its heart, On Sundays She Picked Flowers is a novel as much about a woman who finds, reclaims, and creates her sense of self and upholds that no matter who challenges it as it is a story of blood, abuse, matricide, and cannibalism. This is horror done right--with not empty shock, not tired repetition parroting previous commercial success, but intent that drives the narrative as much as Jude's character.
At its heart, On Sundays She Picked Flowers is a novel as much about a woman who finds, reclaims, and creates her sense of self and upholds that no matter who challenges it as it is a story of blood, abuse, matricide, and cannibalism. This is horror done right--with not empty shock, not tired repetition parroting previous commercial success, but intent that drives the narrative as much as Jude's character.