“How to Manage the Void”: A Review of Sharon Heath’s The History of My Body, The Fleur Trilogy, Book 1
(Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2016), ISBN-13: 978-0-9979517-0-7 I am going to be up front here. I love this book, which is in large part due to its main character, Fleur Robins, daughter of an ultra-Conservative US Senator from Pennsylvania and an alcoholic mother who had Fleur as a teenager. Fleur is one of the most delightful, complex, and often contradictory child characters since Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Sheila Tubman in Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great —two characters that had a profound impact on my childhood and, subsequently, my life. Perhaps it is my own growing fascination with Complexity and Chaos Theory, but I have been noticing a recent trend in storytelling—be it novels, television, or (to a lesser extent) film—that comes into play with Sharon Heath’s approach. It began with the male anti-hero in television shows like The Leftovers and Walking Dead , who is flawed, isolated, and oftentimes just pla...