Categories: reviews
Today on Broken Frontier, Lydia Turner reviews Chrysanthemum Under the Waves – Maggie Umber Provides a Darkly Layered, Haunting Insight into Her Psyche Across Nine Vignettes. It means so much that she writes I should be "immensely proud of the darkly layered, haunting insight into her psyche that she has so bravely bared to the world"! I am so grateful for her review. She says in part:
The inspiration for the underlying darkness of Chrysanthemum Under the Waves was the ‘demon-lover’ literature of some of the greats, like Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bowen. These kinds of stories tend to confront the haunting effects of the past and the unresolved emotional ties of the present, with themes of memory, loss and haunting throughout.
Umber’s wordless illustrations definitely reflect this feeling. They are inky, dark, abstract, odd, and yet strangely alluring. These aren’t simple vignettes in which the illustrations will easily tell you the meaning; rather, these short stories are unclear, with handfuls of disturbing meanings being able to be drawn from the pages.
Read the full review on Broken Frontier.
🖤 Maggie