An Invisible Sign of My Own: The Fine Art of Quitting
My review of this novel was published by Off the Shelf! Check out the full piece there.
“Mona Gray is a quitter—and she’s proud of it. Unlike most of us, who are so fixed in our routines that we become afraid to abandon a dead-end job, a failed pursuit, or a waning love interest, Mona relishes in letting go of even the brightest aspects of her life. She quits dessert just to see if she can. She stops running track, even though she’s a star. She quits boyfriends and piano and even egg salad. For her, quitting is a bonsai-like art: just as something new and promising begins to take root and grow, she chops it away and discards it.
It is fitting, then, that for Mona’s twentieth birthday, she buys herself an ax, symbolizing her unusual, obsessive desire to destroy and to break with reality. Even stranger is that she decides to hang it on the wall of the grade school classroom where she teaches. The ax ominously haunts the rest of the novel, threatening to sever the delicate ties Mona is forming with the people around her. It is in this way that An Invisible Sign of My Own uses its core of magical realism and its unlikely course of events to create one of the most surprisingly relatable characters in fiction.”