Book Review: Sift

IndieBookView

Nov 1

Sift

by Alissa Hattman

Genre: Literary Fiction / Dystopian

ISBN: 9781737925835

Print Length: 126 pages

Publisher: The Third Thing

Reviewed by Nathaniel Drenner

Alissa Hattman's Sift opens with a sense of wonder, even of joy, at emerging to the outside world after a long period of emotional and physical isolation. Perhaps this is surprising for a novel that is at its heart about grief, a grief that continues to have profound impact over the course of the narrative. But it is also a story of recovery and transformation, a story about beauty found in the midst of despair.

Though it follows a definitive plot, Sift is a meditation driven by emotion rather than action. Written in the form of 59 prose poems, the novel is set in a dystopian near future after an unexplained climate disaster, in a world controlled by an unspecified authoritarian government. Few hints about the wider setting are given, but that is no matter: the narrator's forward momentum is the focus. The broader setting is a resonant, but subordinate, backdrop.

"I thought that being inside would protect me, with its corners and its curtains, then a kindness took me by the throat and stretched me taut against the sky, beaming, and I found something more valuable than protection. If only you could have seen it, Mother. What light."