Welcome to Read This Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! All throughout November, I’ll be sharing some books written by Indigenous authors from across Turtle Island (North America).
And Then She Fell: A Novel by Alicia Elliot
Alicia Elliott, a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River, writes about Alice, a young Mohawk writer trying to write a novel about her people’s creation story while also caring for her young daughter.
From the outside, Alice seems to have the perfect life. Her white husband is wonderful. He’s kind, caring, and quick to take over caring for their daughter so she can have a break. But there’s something just off about him. He downplays the racism Alice experiences from her husband’s colleagues. Her husband doesn’t want her family around to help with the baby because he feels that they should be able to parent on their own.
Disconnected from her Nation, her community, Alice feels like she’s losing her mind. The trees are sending her pictures of their memories. Pocahontas, the Disney version, keeps talking to her, describing how Disney got her story all wrong. Alice keeps seeing cockroaches all over the house. And Alice can’t help but think that her half-white newborn daughter hates her.
Elliott uses horror elements to communicate Alice’s different experiences of the world. Alice experiences visions and voices that she knows can’t be really there…or can they? Alice spirals, and we, as readers, aren’t sure what’s real and what’s not either. As Alice experiences more and more microaggressions from the white people in her “well-to-do” neighborhood, her husband continues to gaslight her. Alice wonders if she, with all of her intergenerational trauma, is too “damaged” to continue with her “perfect” life with her husband in their white neighborhood.
I loved the suspense of this novel. As Alice moves through her everyday life, we can’t help but feel with her that she’s fallen down the rabbit hole into a white world that is more than happy to remind her that she doesn’t belong. What is real? What is not? Is she going to wake up and realize that this was all a dream, just like her namesake in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
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That’s it for this week! You can find me over on my substack Winchester Ave, over on Instagram @kdwinchester, or on my podcast Read Appalachia. As always, feel free to drop me a line at kendra.d.winchester@gmail.com. For even MORE bookish content, you can find my articles over on Book Riot.
Happy reading, Friends!
~ Kendra