Sleight
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A daring novel about families, artistic responsibility, and tragedy.
Sisters Lark and Clef have spent their lives honing their bodies for sleight, an interdisciplinary art form that combines elements of dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word. After being estranged for several years, the sisters are reunited by a deceptive and ambitious sleight troupe director named West who needs the sisters’ opposing approaches to the form—Lark is tormented and fragile, frightened by the art she is compelled to make; Clef is driven to excel.
But when a disturbing mass murder makes national headlines, West seizes on the event as inspiration for his new performance, one that threatens to destroy the very artists performing it.
In language that is at once unsettling and hypnotic, Sleight explores ideas of performance, gender, and family to ask the question: what is the role of art in the face of unthinkable tragedy?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This muddled debut novel, though ostensibly about "sleight" (a fictional interdisciplinary art form combining dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word), provides no clear definition of sleight. That Kaschock, the author of two poetry collections (Unfathoms; A Beautiful Name for a Girl), never offers a clear visual of this practice is only one of the book's many problems. Focusing on two sleightist sisters, Clef and Lark, the novel examines their troubled relationship, which is paralleled by the strained bond between two brothers, Byrne and Marvel. These four troubled sleightists are brought together by West, a less-than-scrupulous sleight director, in order to create an unorthodox sleight based on the tragic murder of 25 children. As the intense preparations for the performance collide with the legacies of past transgressions, the sleightists begin to fall apart, even as they increasingly come to feel that sleight offers their only chance at salvation. The reader may well feel some of the presumed contortions of sleight while attempting to make sense of this strenuously pretentious and humorless novel.
