Slipstreams: A Genre I Just Heard Of

Hi everyone! Yes, I'm back. If you were wondering what happened to me, I got married a month ago (actually, today is our one-month anniversary... huh, how 'bout that??) and went to Hawaii for two weeks for our honeymoon. It was absolutely incredible; the wedding went nearly perfectly, except for some gown mishaps, and Hawaii was probably the best vacation I have ever been on and will go on in a very long time.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about today. Today, I wanted to share something bookish with you all, something I was taught this past weekend at the Children's Literature Association's annual conference. This year the conference was held at Simmons College, my now alma mater (I graduated last month from the library science program). I was lucky enough to be chosen as a volunteer, and as a result I was able to attend the conference for free. The theme was "Literary Slipstreams," and as I attended the panels I got a more clear idea of just what a slipstream is.

Slipstream is apparently a genre that was named in the 1980s by author Bruce Sterling, referring to works that are somewhere between the genres science fiction and fantasy and mainstream fiction. Many of you will be familiar with the term magical realism, which will most likely bring Gabriel Garcia Marquez to mind. Slipstream and magical realism can be one and the same, from my understanding; basically, if you think something is realistic fiction and then all of a sudden find something fantastical happening, you are probably reading a slipstream novel.

I am really glad to know about this genre now; there are a lot of books that I've read that don't quite fit in one genre or the other. I will review a book later on this week that I think fits into this genre, though others might disagree—I'd be interested to hear what you all think.

Review: "Waiting for June" by Joyce Sweeney

Title: Waiting for June
Author: Joyce Sweeney
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish, 2003
Where I got it: The library, hooray.

Sophie is a high school senior, trying to save up enough money for her college education and get through her final year so she can work toward her goal of becoming a poet. She also happens to be pregnant. This does not make her life easy, as she is constantly harassed in school, gets in bitter fights constantly with her mother (who refuses to share the identity of Sophie's own father), and tries to avoid everyone's questions and suspicions of who has fathered her child. Yet Sophie deeply loves her unborn daughter, whom she names June, and is nothing but confident and calm when thinking of her future with her. But to make matters even weirder, Sophie has been having dreams about a pod of whales, dreams so vivid that she is sure they are more than just dreams, that they (and her daughter) are trying to tell her something. The closer the due date approaches, the more secrets are revealed to both Sophie and to the reader.

This slim volume packs a lot of issues into a poetic and lovely story. The only way I can describe the prose is floaty and calm. Nothing ever seems rushed—Sweeney takes her time telling the story, even through the tenser moments and action scenes. As we get deeper into the story, the mysteries get more and more intriguing. Sophie's dreams kick up a notch, to an almost supernatural level, and despite her sleuthing she cannot guess the meaning of them until the end, leaving us to make our guesses and hang in there, waiting to find out if we were right.

That said, I found the issue of June's father pretty predictable—yet that didn't really detract from the story for me. I was more interested in why Sophie was having the dreams, and finding out about her own past. Her mother is very bitter and angry about the pregnancy, even though she herself has a somewhat sullied past. She is a single mother, and gives no indication of how she got there. Sophie is haunted by the fact that she doesn't know her own heritage or where she came from, and uses her pregnancy and the need to know her family's medical history to figure this out.

In the end, this book is about women's solidarity and independence. It is full of strong women who do what needs to be done and take care of each other. All of them band together when it comes down to it, though some take longer than others, and everything is done with as much dignity as possible. It's a quick read, but gave me that happy feeling you get after reading a good story.