Sunday, December 7, 2014

This Book Will Change Your Life - Excavation by the Wendy C. Ortiz.

We suppose we might have experienced Excavation by the Wendy C. Ortiz as a fever dream regardless of a week interspersed with travel, work, read, and whatever tangled knot of an east coast flu strain we have battled with for almost ten days now. Assuming of course, that you embrace the idea of a fever dream as something both intense and confusing. Which is not to say Excavation is confusing in the sense that the story of a young woman, in this case very young, near tween young, and the male predator who knows her, understands her vulnerabilities, and seeks to groom her, isn't a story we hear all too often these days. However, to read the story in the form of fragments being lifted from Ortiz's memory and reformulated as story. As an exploration of her understanding about what went down, and the role she played in it, then and now, and all points in between. And as presented not as a survival tale, but more as this is how it was, and this is how it is, matter of fact, but no less intense, or confusing, in terms of what it may of meant to her then, and certainly means to her now. Well, that is something different. Something absorbing, and a story that in Ortiz's hands, and searching mind, is likely to not only change your life, but ensure that Excavation can't easily be put down, much less forgotten, as the days pass, fever dreams or not.

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