From Powells.com
Booksellers’ 25 Favorite Novellas
Staff Pick
Glaciers technically spans one day in the life of Isabel, a twenty-something woman who works in the basement of the Central Library in downtown Portland, furnishes her life with vintage postcards and thrift store collections, and gently yearns for her coworker. Emotionally, it spans decades, visiting the memories of her childhood in Alaska and imagined stories of her secondhand treasures triggered by her movements through the day. While Isabel and her peers are young and full of potential, they’ve also lived and accumulated stories and scars — Alexis M. Smith skillfully captured a very specific and true twenty-something world-weariness, without it coming off as insufferable or naïve. This novella is a tribute to quiet, meaningful moments: a languid morning, an assessment in a mirror, a chance encounter. Glaciers is unhurried but precise; Glaciers is vast but expertly contained; Glaciers is perfect. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Her story could be told in other people's things. The postcards and the photographs. A garnet ring and a needlepoint of the homestead. The aprons hanging from her kitchen door. Her soft, faded, dog-eared copy of Little House in the Big Woods. A closet full of dresses sewn before she was born. All these things tell a story, but is it hers?"
Isabel is a single twenty-something in Portland, Oregon, who repairs damaged books in the basement of the local library, dreaming of a life she can't quite reach. She is filled with longing — for a life in Amsterdam even though she's never visited, for the unrequited love of a coworker, for a simpler time from her childhood in Alaska among the threatened glaciers she loves, and for the perfect vintage dress to wear to a party that just might change everything.
Unfolding over the course of a single day, Alexis M. Smith's shimmering debut finds Isabel looking into her past — remembering her parents' separation, a meeting with an astrologer, and a life-changing encounter with a glacier — and shows us how fleeting, everyday moments can reveal an entire life. In classic movies, in old photographs and unsent postcards, rare books, and thrifted gems, Glaciers tells the story of a young woman's love of the past and a hope to make something new and all her own.
Review
“A delicate and piercing first novel. Glaciers is like a vintage dress: charming, understated and glinting with memories of loneliness and love.” Jane Mendelsohn
Review
‘A spare, beautifully written first novel.” Library Journal
Review
“Lyrical and luminous.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
About the Author
Alexis M. Smith's writing has appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, Moss, Portland Review, Bon Appétit, The Spokesman-Review and elsewhere. Her second novel, Marrow Island, is the winner of a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
Maris Kreizman is the host of The Maris Review, a weekly literary podcast from Lit Hub. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, and more. Her essay collection, I Want To Burn This Place Down, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins.