OH MY GOODNESS. This is a 5 star book. I can say with great confidence that I have never, ever read a book like this before. McCandless' creativity and imagination were on full display with this work - she pushed the creative nonfiction genre lightyears ahead with this work and I can't wait to read more of her work in the future. This book...goodness me. It chewed me up and left me in tears at the end. I'm truly in awe.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Through Persephone’s Children, Rowan McCandless has created a unique and beautifully crafted memoir that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. McCandless employs a variety of techniques throughout her essays to navigate through her experiences and articulate her journey through heartbreak, abuse, oppression, and trauma. We are introduced to McCandless’ world in her first essay, an alphabetic acrostic. She goes on to use the format of a contract to indicate how her husband controlled her, the rules that he imposed on her, and the abuse that she suffered. Other literary devices include crossword clues, writing prompts to explore varying aspects of her life, construction reports, and an inventory. My personal favourites were a quiz entitled “Hunger Games”, which allowed her to describe her struggle with an eating disorder and how the ways in which her family’s shaping of her identity contributed to this, and a short involving interactions with a director and scriptwriter as she and her husband took their respective parts in the script written for them to relay their relationship. Noteworthy in the latter is the blame placed on McCandless for the failings of the relationship, indicating her thoughts and feelings about her role as a victim of abuse. I also thought it was interesting how she identified with Persephone, a mythological character who has “a dual identity as queen of the underworld and as Kore the maiden and goddess of fertility. [McCandless] wondered how Persephone felt having to perpetually straddle two worlds through no fault of her own”. Born to a white mother and Black father, McCandless’ biracial roots and dual identity are woven through her essays.

Ultimately, McCandless uses these methods of storytelling to enable herself to work through the trials of her journey to this point, but it makes for incredibly remarkable reading and a unique insight into the mind of a woman that has suffered from abuse, burden, loss, and a search for identity for a large part of her life. What never fails to come through this all is the love she has for her daughters, which is testament to the strength and resilience of her character.

This is a beautiful book - lots of lists and thoughts and metaphors. Trees and houses and moving forwards . It felt like the privilege of being inside the jumbled thoughts of an abused woman living in a nightmare into moving on into list making and sorting and surviving..
The kind of writing that stays with you.

*ARC provided by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review*

Persephone’s Children is a memoir unlike any other. It is told through many different essays, in many different forms, including (but not limited to) an alphabetized list, a field study, multiple choice Q&A, religious and cultural rituals, text message exchanges, a glossary of terms, as well as regular essays.

The main subject of the memoir is McCandless’s most recent abusive marriage, and how she got help to leave. The author also discusses the domestic abuse from her first marriage, childhood sexual assault, her eating disorder and how it relates to her racial identity as a mixed Black person with intergenerational trauma, and her relationship with her parents and other family members that may have led her to “lose her voice”. She discusses how therapy, her daughters, and ultimately writing and its surrounding community helped her find her voice again.