Review by Booklist Review
Meditative, analytic, and heartfelt, In the Rhododendrons explores the imperfect ways in which introspection consoles our deepest sufferings. An innovative contribution to life writing, Christle's memoir examines her lived experience, including her emotionally strained relationship with her mother and struggles with mental health, through the figure of Virginia Woolf. Merging intimate and documentary tones, Christle exudes a refreshing approach to imagination--one that involves reconstructing unlikely human connections. As she draws parallels between her experience, her mother's life, and Woolf's perspective, Christle demonstrates how the thinking processes involved in comparing, likening, and contrasting are deeply imaginative. Forming these connections, she writes, can even be restorative, particularly through the unearthing of buried topics like sexual assault. Paying homage to hybrid forms, the memoir plays with genre by incorporating analysis of Woolf's canon, close readings of literature, and footnotes of Christle's thoughts. Mesmerizing and at times whimsical, this book brings readers on a journey beyond linear time and across continents, all for the sake of finding comfort and beauty in the garden of words.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet and memoirist Christle (The Crying Book) delves into her relationship with her mother and the work of Virginia Woolf in this dazzling account. Raised in New Hampshire by a buttoned-up English mother and an American father in the merchant marines, Christle returned to England with her mother in 1995 for her grandfather's funeral. During that trip, a teenage Christle was sexually assaulted in the alley behind a London nightclub. In the aftermath, she acted out to gain mother's attention, but her mother only withdrew further; years later, Christle's mother revealed that she was molested as a child. Returning to England in the years after her assault, Christle visited key locations in her own family history and the life of Virginia Woolf--who lived in the same part of London as Christle's mother--in an effort to plunge "behind the rhododendrons" like Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway so she could better understand her mother. With lyrical prose ("If a sign's words remain the same, their meaning can shift, the letters cracking enough to let us inside and rearrange what was thought to be settled"), a sharp analytical sensibility, and staggering reserves of empathy, Christle delivers a unique and potentially transformative catalog of healing. Readers will be rapt. Photos. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Making sense of trauma. Award-winning poet and YA novelist Christle examines her life, her relationship with her mother, and her affinity with Virginia Woolf in a lyrical memoir that circles around an event that occurred when Christle was 14. In the U.K. for her grandfather's funeral, one of many trips she made with her English mother to visit relatives, she was excited to be staying with a cousin. One night, she went out with him and his girlfriend, first to a pub, where she got drunk, then to a club, where a man led her out to an alleyway and assaulted her. She was so drunk that she wasn't sure she had been raped, but her cousin's girlfriend got her a morning-after pill just in case. Shaken by the assault, she felt wounded as well by her mother's apparent lack of empathy. "Where had she been, I thought, when I was alone in my cousin's flat?" Already a rebellious teenager, she became even more volatile: "Anger filled the space where connection could have been." Christle reprises her distress as she recounts several subsequent journeys to the U.K.: with her mother and sister in 2018, and three on her own in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Each time, she searched for a new understanding of what happened to her. Woolf accompanies her on each trip, as Christle thinks about the young Virginia's sexual abuse by her half-brother. Even on trips alone, Christle is accompanied by her mother, whose own disclosure of being "molested" when she was 8 years old complicates Christle's perspective. Covid-19, a friend's suicide, motherhood, and a life-threatening medical emergency all factor into her efforts to find meaning and coherence in the "unknowable parts" of the past. A sensitive chronicle of pain. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
