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The Isle of Youth: Stories, by Laura van den Berg
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Laura van den Berg's gorgeous new book, The Isle of Youth, explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception. From a newlywed caught in an inscrutable marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, the characters in these bewitching stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless, and they will do what it takes to survive.
Each tale is spun with elegant urgency, and the reader grows attached to the marginalized young women in these stories―women grappling with the choices they've made and searching for the clues to unlock their inner worlds. This is the work of a fearless writer whose stories feel both magical and mystical, earning her the title of "sorceress" from her readers. Be prepared to fall under her spell.
An NPR Best Book of 2013
- Sales Rank: #350074 in Books
- Published on: 2013-11-05
- Released on: 2013-11-05
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.45" h x .67" w x 5.01" l, .42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: In her second short story collection, The Isle of Youth, Laura van den Berg plays frequently with readers' expectations. She surprises and delights with her gift for language and tone. If there's a cohesive bond between these seven stories, it's the women who inhabit them, all of whom are in search of something: luck, love, loved ones. Like all great short story collections, Isle is as much about interior landscapes as they are exterior ones. The centerpiece of the book is "Antarctica," about a woman who travels to the Antarctic Peninsula to recover the bones of her dead brother. It's in the frigid topography of the southernmost tip of the world that we discover a haunted secret, one that reveals a heartbreaking meditation on the weight of grief. --Kevin Nguyen
From Booklist
In strange and overwhelming locales—swampy Florida, bleaker-than-bleak Antarctica, and a curious South American waterfall—van den Berg (What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, 2009) explores the lonely, triumphant sorrow of love and family in this new collection. A mother-daughter magician duo isn’t coming close to filling their Hollywood, Florida, shows, so teen Crystal charms wallets out of men at the bar afterward. A band of young cousins, robbing banks in an exultant escape from the “freedom” of their home-schooled, off-the-grid upbringing, attempts to float just above the law, while a couple of nonlicensed PI sisters grasp at their position questionably under it. In the squirming, electric title story, a woman impersonates her twin sister as a favor, with vertiginous results. Van den Berg sends her characters along the undulations of extraordinary familial relationships—navigating their understood strength and, at the same time, arbitrariness—and gathers their piercingly true, hauntingly single voices in this memorable collection. --Annie Bostrom
Review
“Wonder and mystery are recurring motifs. The women here are one step ahead of disaster or one step behind it, and either way they are eager to discover what's next . . . Van den Berg, in this wonderful collection, never lets us turn away.” ―Natalie Serber, The New York Times Book Review
“Confident, gripping stories . . . Ms. van den Berg spins complex plots around a sense of emotional emptiness. Her stories are bursting at the seams, while her characters are lonely to the core.” ―John Williams, The New York Times
“The stories in Laura van den Berg's dreamy The Isle of Youth are absolutely captivating.” ―Vanity Fair
“The Isle of Youth, is a smart, fun, noir-y treasure map of where families hide their secrets and lost souls hide themselves. Van den Berg somehow packs a duffel bag of plot into carry-on-size stories. She also has the right kind of range: from brutal to moving to funny, South America to Paris to Antarctica, really great to freaking outstanding.” ―Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
“Darting, shifting things . . . though her stories find footing in dark matter, the reader ends up feeling something akin to having been freed by the end of the reading . . . [a] tremendous collection.” ―Weston Cutter, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“If you like Murakami's cool prose, that Raymond Chandler-esque aloofness in the face of strange events, have I got the book for you . . . [The Isle of Youth] is a small book, but it feels much bigger. I could have kept reading for days.” ―Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR's All Things Considered
“Curiosity--sprung from idleness, neglect, or betrayal--is a force to be reckoned with in these delicately layered narratives linked by themes of mystery and survival …Van den Berg gracefully captures such unseen moments of triumph and failure as lives are derailed--and discovered--in her stories.” ―ELLE Magazine
“If you like your female protagonists quirky, questing, and quixotic, you will adore this story collection and the author's ability to bore into her characters' innermost thoughts, piercing straight through to their red-hot centers.” ―O, The Oprah Magazine
“van den Berg's sophomore collection of mysterious stories follows likeable ladies with dangerous behavior.” ―Marie Claire
“Amusing and absorbing…” ―Glamour
“With her latest collection of seven stories, The Isle of Youth, Laura van den Berg gives readers a great place to maroon themselves…even though much remains unresolved, van den Berg's stories are still revelatory.” ―The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“…takes wry pleasure in reversing expected gender roles…Ms. van den Berg is perceptive about the ways that her characters--many of them demoralized wives--feel trapped within their identities and grasp at unwise escapes.” ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“A master of the short story creates seven elaborate worlds with beautiful and haunting characters at a time when it feels like most short story collections are pretty thinly plotted.” ―Esquire
“The small, genuine and insightful moments at the heart of each tale mark the progress of a distinguished young writer.” ―Time Out New York
“Van den Berg excels at complexity, eccentricity, maximalism of plot . . . Her emphases on elaborate plot and intentional loose ends are a refreshing departure from the contemporary taste for tidy, minimal plot paired with maximal voices.” ―The New Inquiry
“You know how we're always going on about how this is a really good time for fans of short stories? Laura van den Berg is one of the best examples of why that is totally true, and this new collection on FSG should be all the proof you need. She is at the head of the pack when it comes to young writers that are more comfortable with the shorter form.” ―Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
“A sturdy short story collection works like a good album: strong piece by piece, but also on the whole. "I Looked for You, I Called Your Name" is as strong an opener as I've ever seen in a book of short stories, and it sets the tone and pace for the rest of Laura van den Berg's second work, The Isle of Youth.” ―Grantland
“If ever there was a writer going places, it's Laura van den Berg, who follows up her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, with the ambitious, modular The Isle of Youth, whose seven stories are arranged along the themes of family secrets with noirish intrigue.” ―Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
“A mesmerizing collection of stories about the secrets that keep us.” ―Kirkus
“In The Isle of Youth, a group of young women narrators seek to understand the people in their lives as a means of understanding themselves. Magically, Laura van den Berg turns a group of lost souls into a beautiful and compelling read.” ―Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto
“Laura van den Berg is one of the most freakishly talented young writers at work today, and a master of the short story form. Hers are deliciously unnerving, moving, and monstrous tales.” ―Karen Russell, author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia!
“I've never met Laura, but it seems like we would come across a new story by her every month or so during our reading for Best American Nonrequired Reading. They were uniformly excellent--emotionally complex, very raw--but always with a mixture of pathos and humour that made me think of Lorrie Moore.” ―Dave Eggers, Huck magazine
“The Isle of Youth is simply astonishing. Each story is more surprising, more urgent, more savagely frank than the last. This is an awe-inspiring and necessary collection from one of the most sure-footed writers of our time.” ―Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn
“This collection is rich, surprising, and a lot of fun. The Isle of Youth plays with crime stories of a kind, noir tales of deceit and betrayal, but really each investigates the spaces, the distances, that keep human beings from ever truly knowing one another. Van den Berg is a ridiculously talented writer, and this wonderful book provides the proof.” ―Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
"The short answer: they are a group of people committed to making life as hard as possible."
By Amelia Gremelspacher
The young women in these stories seem to share that characteristic: they are committed to making life as hard as possible. Counterintuitively, they are beguiling people to with whom to engage. In language elegant to read, the author spins the web of each woman's story. My favorite line is one in which the author describes her missing father. "She learned 95 percent of the ocean was unexplored and and thought her father must be like that, too: filled with dark, unseen caverns." Each story opens in a setting pregnant with promise and a young woman on the far side of an abyss. The development of the stories is certainly a bleak descent, but somehow still the reading is a pleasure. I think that even people who are not fans of the short story genre will find this book an entrancing experience.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A collection not to be missed.
By Vivek Tejuja
I have always admitted to the fact that for me, short stories are a little more important than the novel. I am aware that there are literary greats who at one point mastered the form so well, that everything written by anyone after only got compared and perhaps looked pale when done so. There are also times an author comes along and literally makes you wonder about the most amazing genius he or she possesses when penning a short story and perhaps for me after Munro, there is now Laura van den Berg with her dazzling collection of stories, “The Isle of Youth”.
“The Isle of Youth” is mainly about women and their lives. It is about the angry women, the quiet women, and the women who just want to lead uncomplicated lives, which is never the case with them. I think what struck me the most in these stories besides the language, was the strong characterization of both – the men (who obviously are in the background and yet play a vital role) and the women, whose every act and move is monitored, giving the reader the much needed understanding of the why and the how.
Every story in this collection speaks for itself. From the first story in the collection, “I Looked for You, I Called Your Name” with honeymooners’ crash landing in Patagonia to the title story, right at the end, van den Berg will dazzle you with her characteristic eye for detail and landscape of emotions used.
The first story is about the woman discovering her husband’s personality and in the wake of that, her relationship is riddled with doubt and she also begins to understand herself. The nature of the setting, Patagonia in this case also lends to the fragility of the story. For me, what worked the most was the sudden bleakness you are witness to throughout the stories and yet somewhere down the line, there is the underlined hope that is subtle and exquisitely written about.
My favourite story in the collection is, “Opa-Locka” about twin sisters, who are detectives and are entwined in people’s lives, causing unnecessary complications. They discover nothing and leave trails in form of objects and amidst all of this; they are confronted by their father’s criminal past. Why is it my favourite story? Because of the sheer force used to tell this tale. Van den Berg has used all her writing charm according to me in this one. It is that good.
The stories are full of wonder and charm. The women are weak, they are strong, they love and sometimes they also discard their emotions, to make sense of the real world. The stories will have you not look away from the book, till you are done with the collection. They are perfectly structured, coherent and magical. There is no sugar coating and nothing that is saccharine sweet. They are the way life is to a large extent and that is what makes them so readable.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
As Mr. Sondheim said, you've got to have a gimmick...
By The Man in the Hathaway Shirt
In Laura vd B's first collection of stories, the gimmick was "lost" young women in far-flung exotic places where they seemed to be chasing monsters of some sort--sea monsters, bigfeet, etc. All the stories had a certain sameness, as the young women, who always seemed to have mothers or boyfriends/husbands who were scientists, and if one of the two was the scientist then the main character had just lost the other one tragically or been recently dumped/divorced. In this new collection we have the same sparse writing, only this time instead of monsters in far-flung locations we have gorilla mask-wearing thief cousins, mother-daughter magicians, and a PI "sister team." I'm sure she thinks all this is terribly clever, artsy, even intellectual. To me it's rather vapid, and the "oddball" elements of her narratives just keep her from delving into real depth, real emotion, real insight. Some of these stories are as thin as Kate Moss, pre-pregnancy, so she fills them in with krazy karacters and exotic set-ups--heaven forbid a story should take place in Fort Worth. But the emotional payoffs are always expected and ordinary. Lonely, frail people need somebody. Really, they do.
I think she reads the works of one of her idols, Deborah Eisenberg, and notices all the eccentric characters in there. But those eccentric characters function differently: they illuminate the central character and/or situation; in fact, they're not so much eccentric characters as they are "regular" characters who are just writ large, and who explain themselves a great deal more thoroughly and articulately than most ordinary people do. vd B's characters have more of a "Woo-hoo, look at me, I'm bizarre!" quality that adds nothing to the plot/themes. In fact, her plots are pretty non-existent and her themes are thin and repetitive, the same in every story. It seems she only has a small number of things to say but says them over and over.
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