Ms. Hen reviews The Small Backs of Children

 

The Small Backs of Children

Lidia Yuknavitch

Harper Perennial 

2015

Ms. Hen happened to stumble across this book online. She read about it, and decided to give it a chance.

This novel is about a writer who becomes obsessed with a picture of a girl whose house is being blown up behind her in Eastern Europe, the country is not named. A group of friends, the writer's husband, a filmmaker, a bisexual poet and a performance artist, go to the girl's country to save her and bring her back to the States. They contrive a plan.

When Ms. Hen read about this book, it was in the context of a high school reading list. She was not prepared for how triggering this book can be, and she does not think it would be appropriate for a lot of young people. Ms. Hen is not a hen that gets triggered, but she does not like to read about a lot of sexual violence, which this book contains. It's almost pornography in some sections, which Ms. Hen did not like.

Also, the characters in this book are pretentious. The writer, the filmmaker, the performance artist, the photographer, the poet, and the artist do not have names. To Ms. Hen, they are people who don't have lives, she understands that artists can be crazy, and she considers herself a crazy artist, but she thinks she might not be that crazy after reading this book. She does not know what it is to be so unstable that her life is a mess. Ms. Hen has worked to appear to be normal.

This novel got rave reviews, and Ms. Hen does not understand why. Some critics said it was the best book of 2015. Ms. Hen thinks that some people might crave perversion and pretentiousness, and that is why they loved this. Ms. Hen does not crave those things. Ms. Hen is a hen that desires weirdness and originality, quirkiness and surprises.

Ms. Hen read an article while she was reading this book about a protester in Russia of the war who was told she was going to be put in a cell with other prisoners so they could rape her. That article blended into this book that Ms. Hen is reviewing, and when she remembered that, she didn't know if it was in this novel or not. She does not recommend this novel if you are sensitive or intelligent. If not, this is the book for you.