Others of My Kind: A Novel - Hardcover

Sallis, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1620402092 ISBN 13: 9781620402092

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2013

Synopsis

At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor's bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for the local public TV station, and is one of the world's good people.

One evening she returns home to find a detective waiting for her. Though her records are sealed, he somehow knows her story. He asks if she can help with a young woman who, like her many years before, has been abducted and traumatized.

Initially hesitant, Jenny decides to get involved, reviving buried memories and setting in motion an unexpected interchange with the president herself. As brilliantly spare and compact as are all of James Sallis's novels, Others of My Kind stands apart for its female protagonist. Set in a near future of political turmoil, it is a story of how we overcome, how we shape ourselves by what happens to us, and of how the human spirit, whatever horrors it undergoes, will not be put down.

*San Francisco Chronicle

About this title

About the Author

James Sallis is the acclaimed author of more than two dozen volumes of fiction, poetry, translation, essays, and criticism, including the Lew Griffin series, Drive (made into the movie of the same name), Cypress Grove, Cripple Creek, and Salt River. His biography of the great crime writer Chester Himes is an acknowledged classic. Sallis lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Karyn, and an enormous white cat.

Reviews

Starred Review. Sallis (The Killer Is Dying) has always been the master of doing more with less, as he demonstrates once again with this startling experimental novella. When Emily Smith was eight years old, she was abducted and suffered unspeakable abuse at the hands of her male captor, who kept her in a box under his bed for two years. The girl finally escaped, living for 18 months in a shopping mall, eventually becoming a ward of the courts. Twenty-five years later, Emily has become Jenny Rowan, a talented video editor for a Washington, D.C., news station. Her craft is an apt metaphor for the life that she's improvised. Fiercely independent and self-taught, Rowan refuses to see herself as a victim. When a police detective approaches her to help a young abductee, Rowan at first demurs, but she ends up giving the girl, Cheryl, a place to stay. We witness Rowan cobble together her own community, helping a family of squatters who live next door and even reaching out to the U.S. president, whose son has recently been kidnapped. The theme of working with what you have left, a constant in Sallis's world, permeates every sentence of this slim, insightful work. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency. (Sept.)

Jenny Rowan, ace editor at a local TV station, had a horrific childhood: kidnapped at age eight and imprisoned in a box beneath her abductor’s bed, she escaped after 18 months and lived in a mall, becoming an urban legend in the process. Now she holds the world at a remove, keeping her past private and experiencing events primarily through the videos she assembles—yet, ironically, she becomes caregiver and confidante to others, from a fellow victim to one of the most powerful women on earth. While the world rages out of control, from wild weather to terrorist attacks on the White House, Rowan moves through it like the calm at the heart of the storm. The premise calls to mind current events in Cleveland and elsewhere, but there’s more at play here. This will make you think about how—indeed, if—you interact with the world; how we construct our lives; how we heal from tragedy; how to carry on when nothing makes sense. The plot feels simultaneously thin and far-fetched, but this slim novel offers a wellspring for contemplation. --Keir Graff

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1620402092
• ISBN 13: 9781620402092
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 116