Choice 评论
In this study of ten contemporary women novelists, Shinn (Arizona State Univ.) "celebrates the meronymic perspective that sees the shadow in its double, that knows every boundary to be a threshold." Her first chapter, on Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, introduces two motifs that she develops throughout the book: "mythtelling" and communities of women. Exploring the American mind from many angles, Shinn discusses Canadian, British, and South American authors along with Asian Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans. Among those women who articulate "the composite reality that we subsume in the word American" are Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Octavia E. Butler, Isabel Allende, Antonia Susan Byatt, Toni Cade Barbara, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko. The author expands narrow concepts of the novel to include Butler's science fiction, Allende's magic realism, and historical-mythic works like Kingston's The Women Warrior. Urging a multicultural vision, she concludes that storytellers can bring order, love, and healing to a fragmented society. Shinn's bibliography is strong on feminist criticism and studies of mythology. Recommended for academic libraries, upper-division undergraduate and up. J. W. Hall University of Mississippi