Betsy Robinson's Reviews > Sarah Canary

I’m not sure what to make of this dreamlike story. This is an exciting, wild, sometimes fractured woman chase, and the chasers are a wild team of men and one woman with varying levels of sanity and cultures laced with superstitions and myths. The wild woman they pursue is called Sarah Canary.

I’m a one-book-at-a-time reader who likes to sink into a story and read it straight through. Unfortunately I was constantly interrupted during my reading of this book, and it is a testament to the writing that I was as frustrated as I was. I had to restart many times and I often had trouble recalling who people were. And the details in this book are important.

My introduction to Karen Joy Fowler’s work was her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; it made me want to read all her other books. Sarah Canary is a very different creation—a historical novel that shows, from a sly writer’s perspective, the unfair plight of women and animals in our culture, and the unclear nature of truth:

A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth, clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of what is and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see.

I resonate with this quote. I understand it. But in this book I’m not sure what Fowler said or what I saw. Nevertheless, it was an interesting ride and I still want to read all of Fowler’s books.