{"id":5250,"date":"2020-08-07T12:09:21","date_gmt":"2020-08-07T19:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/?p=5250"},"modified":"2020-08-08T14:16:15","modified_gmt":"2020-08-08T21:16:15","slug":"carousel-by-april-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/carousel-by-april-ford\/","title":{"rendered":"Carousel, by April Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"

Winner, 2020 International Book Award for LGBTQ Fiction, Carousel is the debut novel of April Ford and the story of a middle-aged woman caught between the buried emotional impact of her devastating childhood and life on the precipice of retirement with her beautiful true love, Estelle.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The story opens on a description of the world\u2019s first galloping carousel, Le Galopant, (otherwise known as an antique merry-go-round)\u2014magnificent horses frozen in place, yet still turning in circles for riders in an amusement park on a humid July evening in Montreal. Here we meet Margo, via her interior monologue, as she provides a short history of antique carousels, as she tries to photograph something interesting for her wife, and questions when was the last time she and Estelle had done something romantic together? Here Margot admits \u201cAfter two-and-a-half decades with a woman whose gasp-worthy winsomeness and intelligence I had vowed to protect and nurture for the rest of our lives, I was bored.\u201d<\/p>\n

The carousel itself anchors the story that revolves around it\u2014a glimpse into a vulnerable relationship in the wake of a 25-year history and the sudden discovery of essential emotional information from Margot\u2019s past. This history, long ago stashed away, ignored and buried, becomes achingly meaningful as Margot is forced to look at it and acknowledge how it shaped who she is.<\/p>\n

As the story opens, Margot photographs Le Galopant in a confused effort to do something nice for Estelle (whose career focus is the art of photography and who has been oddly obsessed with the ancient carousel). Here she meets a lanky young woman at 17 who captures her gaze and ultimately becomes the temptation dangling before her in her dissatisfied state of restlessness. Her name is Katy, and during this evening in July, Katy snaps a photo of Margot atop a galloping horse on the carousel, a photograph that Estelle would claim \u201cin the twilight of our marriage, the most telling photograph of a person she had ever seen.\u201d The rest of the story is the circuitous path toward understanding what that photograph might be and how it could be so telling.<\/p>\n

At the outset, Estelle mirrors her partner\u2019s unease, and has been meeting with a couple\u2019s counsellor named Weinstock for the past five months, a counsellor who gives them a homework assignment\u2014some kind of physical distancing over a vague timeline. As Margot goes through an evening at a fancy hotel by herself, the reader endures this temporary separation through her simmering discomfort and ambivalence of being forcefully separated from Estelle.<\/p>\n

Constantly referring to Estelle as \u201cmy wife,\u201d Margot perhaps unintentionally insinuates possession rather than simple relational identity. After its use over and over when Margo could simply say, \u201cEstelle\u201d instead of \u201cmy wife,\u201d these words of ownership and societal definition betray an underlying defiance and insecurity inherent in Margot\u2019s personality and her relationship with Estelle. Although it seems that Margot is the straying member of this partnership, and she controls the narrative, the reader is forced to guess at Estelle\u2019s intentions.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother had already gone mad by the time she gave birth to me,\u201d begins Margot, remembering the secret of her life that she has kept from Estelle. As we learn about the remarkable events when Margot\u2019s beautiful mother met her rich and impetuous father, as we learn about Margot\u2019s neglected childhood, as she meanders through her own story, like the child she was when she first experienced it, the devastating emotional reality of her experiences build, one on top of the other. As Estelle discovers the truth of Margot\u2019s origins, in unopened letters from Margot\u2019s mother, Margot is forced to admit that her relationship with Estelle was based upon a lie. Of course, Margot would be having a crisis of the soul. One can only keep the lid on this kind of history for so long.<\/p>\n

Throughout this journey, even as she is in the same room with Margot, Estelle comes in and out of focus, but in the snippets where we experience her, she is surprisingly faithful, loving and upbeat about their union; she works hard to unlock Margot\u2019s secrets\u2014secrets, that Estelle has discovered, stand firmly as obstacles to deeper intimacy.<\/p>\n

The discovery of the truth that Margot had tried to escape through denial are teased out over the length of the novel, until finally, at Estelle\u2019s insistence, both are in the same room with Margot\u2019s institutionalized mother, Marguerite. It is here we feel the weight of witnessing a frail life almost at its end, having been wasted in a cloud of mental illness and alcoholism. From Margot\u2019s POV, (the child returning to the devastation of her meaningless childhood), we experience the contempt of Marguerite\u2019s altered personality, and understand that a parent can always injure her child.<\/p>\n

Written by a deft storyteller, the novel features delightful snippets of description around every corner: \u201cWhen I turned back, Estelle looked at me like a little girl stricken from having failed her spelling bee.\u201d In describing her mother\u2019s emerging \u201ccatastrophic flaw\u201d Margot creates a moving picture of her own desperate discovery: \u201cNow that it had emerged, like a swimmer finally succeeding in breaking the surface after being held under water by a bully, it was swiping and clawing at everything in its way . . .\u201d And although the story must go down the wounding path of Margot\u2019s childhood, the novel is light, its characters optimistic and lovable and the experience of reading it\u2014delightful.<\/p>\n

Inanna Publications & Education, Inc.<\/p>\n

Publication date: May 8, 2020<\/p>\n

Reviewer: Caitlin Hicks<\/p>\n

This review was Published at New York Journal of Books, August 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Winner, 2020 International Book Award for LGBTQ Fiction, Carousel is the debut novel of April Ford and the story of a middle-aged woman caught between the buried emotional impact of her devastating childhood and life on the precipice of retirement with her beautiful true love, Estelle. The story opens on a description of the world\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pondering-the-brilliance-of-existence","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5250"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5254,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions\/5254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}