I went into this looking for office/corporate horror. I suppose I got that, to a certain extent, but this turned out to be a much more artsy and experimental book than I had hoped for.

The book's gimmick is that it's written/produced using actual office stamps. As a result, each page usually only has about 1-4 short lines of text.

At the beginning, readers are told that this is being written by an office worker at the subsidiary, using only the stamps found around the office. On June 5, 2008, workers are told that there will be a power supply interruption between 8:30 AM and 8:00 PM and that they are to remain at their workstations. The doors are locked, and the phone lines are down. The power outage goes on for a good deal longer than planned, but things at the subsidiary become hellish for the women in only 24 hours, if I interpreted things correctly.

All characters were disabled in some way and were only referred to by their disabilities: the blind girl, the mute girl, the lame man, the one-eyed man, and the one-armed man. The narrator never spoke of himself in the third person, but he'd have been "the colorblind man." I got the impression that the narrator was forced to work for the subsidiary after being diagnosed with colorblindness, but the book's setup forced readers to do a lot of interpretation, so I could be wrong. For example, I disagree with those reviewers who thought that the dogs mentioned in the text were a literal pack of wild dogs running around in the building - I think it was a metaphor for the animalistic behavior of the workers.

While reading this, I was reminded of issue #6 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, "24 Hours," in which customers and employees in a diner become increasingly animalistic and brutal over the course of 24 hours. However, I felt that Gaiman did it better. Things became nasty pretty quickly in both stories, but in Gaiman's there was a solid reason for it. In The Subsidiary, the reason seemed to be "it's dark and people are scared," but that didn't work for me. In only 24 hours, the narrator was telling the deaf girl to pay for the candle he gave her with sex. After three days, the lame man captured a boy who, from the sounds of things, he periodically raped. (I assumed all instances of "girl" actually meant "woman," since the deaf girl was another employee, but the one instance of "boy" seemed to indicate an underage character, in which case the lame man was a pedophile.)

There were no mentions of any of the practicalities of trying to survive in a building where the power had been cut and the doors locked so that no one could leave - nothing about food, water, restrooms, etc. Instead, the text's entire focus was on the things the characters did to each other, which culminated in one character's death. I'm not sure what Celedón was aiming for, but it didn't work for me on any level.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

 

I never thought I'd write to the teacher at the white school. I don't know as I've ever thought about the white school, really, before all this integration business got started. But here I am, fixing to go there come September.

--Chapter 1

 

This historical fiction novel tells the story of integration in a small town and how a young girl sees things. Kizzy Ann Stamps is a young girl of color who doesn't really want to go to the "white school". The book is set up as letters Kizzy writes to her new teacher and once school starts, a journal. Each chapter is a letter and later a journal entry. Kizzy loves to write and enjoys telling Miss Anderson all about her and her dog Shag in her letters.

Kizzy is very honest in her letters and expresses what she is feeling about whatever is going on in her life. As the story progresses, we see that Kizzy has a strong personality and sometimes speaks when she shouldn't and it gets her in trouble. But, Kizzy is also very smart, very determined and very resilient.

The author writes beautifully and really captures the voice of a young black girl during the time of segregation. At least as far as I can tell, being pretty far removed from that myself. I guess what I'm saying is, Kizzy is a compelling character and she seems real. Kizzy goes through some highs and lows. She is kept from doing some things because of the color of her skin, but she does break some barriers.

To me, this novel speaks of hope. How even though things seem set in concrete, there are always people with open minds who are willing to see the benefits of change. Of course there  are those who are dead set against change, but that doesn't mean we stop trying to make life better.

Enough preaching. Here are some quotes that I especially liked.

I cannot believe the upside-downness of the world. One day your biggest problem is whether you feel like you can work with a man whose eyebrows are alive, and the next minute your problem is that your country's president is dead.

How can one man dying make the whole world hush?

 

He's my daddy, you know. But sometimes, I just don't know what's right. He'll do something and it feels, um, ugly or mean or something. I get mixed up then. I just don't always know what's right. You know what I mean?

 

The makeup didn't bring back the old me. It wasn't the old Kizzy Ann. It was just some other girl, someone I didn't know. It was a disguise, just a disguise.

 

I was not amazed at the hug from you -- I know by now that you really do love me even if you are white and I am not -- but when the crowd gasped, I thought we were in trouble.

 

I looked to my friends, my friends who were there for me, there with me, this finest moment in my life. I knew that it didn't matter whether we won any place at all. For that experience, on that course, I was an equal.

I enjoyed this book very much. Historical fiction seems to be growing on me. I used to think I didn't like this genre much. But, recently I've read several historical fiction books that touched me. It's always fun to discover something new that you enjoy.

Recommended to:

Readers in grades 3-5 that enjoy historical stories or stories about young girls overcoming odds.

When Sharon Maas first made it known to her then-agent and then-editor that she was thinking about writing a book set in her native Guyana, she met with blank incomprehension and utter rejection: "Guyana? Whyever would anyone write about that little backwater country; a place nobody knows anything about and which probably at least half her projected readership wouldn't even be able to correctly point out on a map? No no no," she was told, "stick with what is safe and what people know. And if you want to write a book set in an exotic location, write something set in India. You know India, right? You've lived there – so you can just as credibly write about that. And there are plenty of people out there who do want to read books set in India. It's even a sort of literary trend these days. You'll fit right in."

Sharon's response, after actually having published three books in which Indian settings played a crucial role, was to refuse to work with anybody who was not open to her own ideas about the construction and settings of her books; even if that meant not having any literary agent at all, nor a publisher, for the foreseeable future. The one thing she did not do, however, was stop writing. And looking for a new publisher, who would accept her without any preconceived notions about which niche to fit her in. Over a decade after the publication of her third novel, The Speech of Angels, she finally struck gold – so now here it is, the book (or first of several books, hopefully) that might never have gone to print if its author had not finally found a publisher willing to take her on solely on the strength of her writing, and accept the chosen setting as an asset rather than a burden.

Read the full review on my own website (ThemisAthena.info) or on Leafmarks.

It was an interesting book, but I felt it lacked a bit. Maybe because I don't really care about stamps and all that, and practically the whole book is about stamps.

I also didn't really like the main character, maybe because she was such a know-it-all character and I tend to dislike those, especially if they act like how she did.

Also I noticed some spelling/grammar mistakes, while a lot was good British-English, there were some parts that had the wrong spelling/grammar. Favorite? Color? Nope.

In overall a fun book, if you like murder, a little girl and lots of stamps.