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 “powerfully original” novel that explores ideas of artistic performance, gender, and family in the shadow of an unthinkable tragedy (Kirkus Reviews). 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. Estranged for several years, the sisters are reunited by West, an ambitious sleight troupe director who needs the sisters’ opposing approaches to the form—Lark is tormented and fragile, but a prodigy; Clef is driven to excel, but lacks the spark of artistic genius. 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—or drive them to the very edge of sanity in this unique novel from “a wildly talented writer” (Adam Levin, author of The Instructions).
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.
