I personally really enjoyed Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell. The style in which
she writes is easy to read. It is casual and real feeling, but has the interest
of concept in its inclusion of supernatural or fantastical elements. There is
something super engaging about reading these kinds of fantastical situations
thrust into a very realistic situation and style. Sleep Donation hits on a lot of those same notes, which makes it
just as easy and enjoyable to read. It’s all very fantastical in concept and
subject matter, but is told in such a way that it feels real and all the
characters and their struggles feel real. It’s not too fantastical so that it
is pushed out of the realm of the believable. I can easily suspend my disbelief
when reading Karen Russell’s writing and become fully engaged in her world.
When we talk about a writer’s voice, it is comprised of many
of the different elements that I have touched on above. Writer’s voice comes
through in structure of exactly how the author writes, it comes through in
tone, it comes through in what the author seems to like writing about, and it
comes through in the feeling that the author’s writing creates in their
readers. Karen Russell’s tone overall is casual. It’s not overly formal but
it’s also not so casual that it’s irreverent or sounds like a teenager. The
story is told through first person so we have to separate character voice from
author voice, but I think that in this case, they match very closely. When I
read Sleep Donation, even though the
main character is completely different from Vampires
in the Lemon Grove, they seem very similar. I sometimes forget that the
story is being told in first person. All the other characters in Russell’s
stories have distinct character and characterization. They all feel like real,
different individuals; the narrators do too, but I think Russell’s voice comes
through a lot more in them, just because of the nature of a first person
narrative. The first person narrators become their own characters when their
darker sides begin to be revealed.
Karen Russell’s writing is also saturated with emotion.
Things happen around the characters, but the real story generally is about
their own inner turmoil and what they are dealing with. Both of her narrator
characters have a lot of anxiety, stress, and conflicting emotions about what
they are and what they do. Her narrators question themselves and their own
motives a lot. They question what they do in life. This question and feeling
lost or disconnected from what one should be doing is something very tangible
and relatable to many audiences and I would hazard a guess that this internal
struggle and anxiety is something that Russell has personally experienced. When
it comes to personal voice, at least for me, I tend to write characters that I
can personally identify with; who have similar traits or similar insecurities
to me. I think the fact that both of the focal characters in these two works
have this internal moral battle is a good indicator of what Russell’s own
experiences might have been.
Both stories feel very melancholy. They have resolutions and
feel complete, but not in a ‘happy ending’ kind of way. They feel complete and
satisfying in a real way, and real life isn’t always so happy. Russell doesn’t
really seem to ascribe to that cynical tone that a lot of dystopian writers
take, however, where “everyone is terrible and everything sucks”. Sleep Donation is in essence a dystopian
work, however, it is not a commentary or declaration against society. It is a
telling of a personal story, again, focused on internal struggle and emotion
more than the actual events and corruption happening in the society.
I really did enjoy both of these stories. They were easy to
read because of how engaging and different they were. I definitely would
consider reading more by Karen Russell in the future.
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