Month: November 2019

Deb Olin Unferth’s story collection, Wait Till You See Me Dance, depicts the outrageously mundane and the uniquely modern parts of today’s human experience. Her characters’ anxieties, expectations and dreams mirror those of anyone growing up in the 21st and latter half of the 20th century. Among the major topics discussed, Unferth forces her audience to consider the utilization and dependence of technology. In “Open Water,” a woman imagines a future romance with a man whose entire past and present she learns from his life online. In addition to the unease that social media brings to our sense of personal security, Unferth confronts today’s era of mass shootings in the United States.

In Hala Alyan’s novel, Salt Houses, she builds a family tree that crosses four generations, takes place in multiple countries, and carries a variety of languages and accents along the way. The layers of tradition and cultural evolution depicted in Salt Houses are almost too complex to put into comprehensible words, but Alyan finds a way to present the narrative so beautifully and with little confusion. While some traditions are shared between parent and child, globalization, politics, and modern technology increase the generational gaps. The fissures are especially deep when it comes to moral values and cultural identity. This leaves a fractal pattern in the novel that captures an ephemeral, yet somehow permanently imprinted, history of one family.