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A review by teresatumminello
Burntcoat by Sarah Hall
3.0
3.5
Informed by and written during our time of pandemic, the November book for the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is another selection worthy of the “club’s” name.
The story of a fictional pandemic, it’s told by an artist looking back on her experiences as she creates a commissioned sculpture to memorialize the victims. Her relationships with her partner and her mother are paramount, though she reflects on others as well. The story is written to a “you,” who is the aforementioned partner—at least at first. Addressed later is a different “you,” one she realizes has been with her since she was a young girl.
This is my first Hall, so I don’t know if it’s indicative of her style or not. I liked its thoughts and ideas, especially those concerning the role of storytelling and artmaking while facing down death. It gets one of my ambivalent ratings because I didn’t always connect to the story’s execution, though I appreciated its relevancy, its ambition, and the visceral rendering of the toll illness takes on the body and on caretakers. Hall has done all this in not many pages, effectively utilizing white spaces instead of chapters.
Informed by and written during our time of pandemic, the November book for the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is another selection worthy of the “club’s” name.
The story of a fictional pandemic, it’s told by an artist looking back on her experiences as she creates a commissioned sculpture to memorialize the victims. Her relationships with her partner and her mother are paramount, though she reflects on others as well. The story is written to a “you,” who is the aforementioned partner—at least at first. Addressed later is a different “you,” one she realizes has been with her since she was a young girl.
This is my first Hall, so I don’t know if it’s indicative of her style or not. I liked its thoughts and ideas, especially those concerning the role of storytelling and artmaking while facing down death. It gets one of my ambivalent ratings because I didn’t always connect to the story’s execution, though I appreciated its relevancy, its ambition, and the visceral rendering of the toll illness takes on the body and on caretakers. Hall has done all this in not many pages, effectively utilizing white spaces instead of chapters.