The Skin and Its Girl & This is How You Lose The Time War
By Vaughn Frantz Miller
The Skin and Its Girl By Sarah Cypher
A young woman kneels at her great-aunt’s grave. In trying to determine the next step to take in her life, she tells her deceased aunt a story. It is a story as complicated as a life from a birds-eye view: a culmination of love, occupation, a sprawling family tree across hundreds of years and the legacy left behind in their homeland. In the center of the story is our narrator Betty, a girl born with striking, cobalt-blue skin. While not even the most fantastical part of the book, it does earn the title The Skin and Its Girl.
“Nothing happens in a straight line, not life or love or even time” the author Sarah Cypher writes. And she puts this line to work, jumping from love at first sight in the 1800s to spring of 2002 right as Betty is born, and then backwards to another generation at the turn of the 20th century, this time involving a timely murder.
As she traces through her life and the impact of her many family members, Betty poetically traces the history of her family, who once owned the preeminent soap factory of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine. That factory hosts the love between her ancestors, and sometimes even their hate; we are given snippets of different periods of time, moments of great passion, and they feel close enough to smell. You see the bone-white soap stamped with a halved pomegranate, a century ago dyed boldly blue in attempt to win the love of a young woman. You hear Betty’s ear-piercing baby screams. You feel the frustration and confusion of her extended relatives when her grandmother sells the soap factory years before Betty is born, and you swallow the lump in your throat as you realize that a mother sold her family’s centuries-old factory, the home of their ingenuity and business, to give her children what she saw as the best chance America could offer. You wonder if the years of bitterness were worth it when the soap factory is bombed to ruins shortly after Betty is born.
The narrator weaves surreal mythology -both Christian and intriguing original- to muse about what separates humans from each other, what causes their failures in communication, and what drives them to make the choices they do. Through these musings and complications, we are given a vulnerably honest look at Betty’s family and the truths which make them. There is a woman in her great-aunt’s past who, at the unmarried aunt’s bitter command, is never spoken of. So why did the two live together? It is perhaps this link that leaves Betty reaching for her deceased relative: at the time of narration, Betty is faced with the choice of committing to her partner whom she deeply loves, knowing that doing so moves her away from her family.
Cypher uses her narrator to draw us into a delicate and intricate story, and
she does so marvelously. Her book is one that is as rooted in the ongoing occupation of Palestine as well as surreal stories of silver gazelles and crumbling Towers of Babel. It is a riveting tale and absolutely worth the read.
Although available online to purchase, TheSkinand It’sGirl is available at multiple San Diego Public Library locations.
This is How You Lose The Time War By Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Welcome to the greatest love story of all … times. This sci-fi novella cowritten by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone will take your heart across time and space through love letters between elite, almost godlike, soldiers on different sides of the war. Not a war, but the war, a war which uses lives, conversations, inventions, even germs across different timelines to culminate into the single goal of victory for one side or the other.
The letters initially start as baiting antagonism. “This is why we’ll win”the first soldier writes on paper after an artful sabotage. But soon (or after centuries, depending on your perspective), there is a question which emerges. After all, can you spend centuries crafting a vulnerable letter within the rings of a tree for someone you do not love? As the lines between the two women as enemies blur and the link between them as lovers develops, the two are eventually faced with unavoidable choices which will change them and the trajectory of the entire war.
As a novella, it is breathtakingly short and vivid in its imagery. I have read the book many times at this point over the years and am still finding new pieces of it I did not appreciate my first few goes. All that to say, it is a book worth owning. For those more skeptical, there are several copies available at San Diego Public Libraries.