Contemporary Authors

• The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction ( nonfiction) Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2009
• Mad Miss Mimic ( novel) Penguin Random House (Plattsburgh, NY), 2017
• The Red Word ( novel) Black Cat (New York, NY), 2018

1. The red word https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028751 Henstra, Sarah, 1972- author. The red word / Sarah Henstra. First Grove Atlantic edition. New York , NY : Black Cat, 2018. 336 pages ; 21 cm PR9199.4.H4665 R43 2018 ISBN: 9780802126559 (softcover) 2. Mad miss mimic https://lccn.loc.gov/2016933005 Henstra, Sarah. Mad miss mimic / Sarah Henstra. Plattsburgh, NY : Penguin Random House Canada Childrens Group, 2017. pages cm ISBN: 9780143192374 (trade pbk.)9780143192381 (epub) 3. The counter-memorial impulse in twentieth-century English fiction https://lccn.loc.gov/2009044148 Henstra, Sarah, 1972- The counter-memorial impulse in twentieth-century English fiction / Sarah Henstra. Basingstoke, UK ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ix, 182 p. ; 23 cm. PR888.G67 H46 2009 ISBN: 9780230577145 (hardback)0230577148 (hardback)

• Sarah Henstra - https://sarahhenstra.com/about/

  about Sarah
  _PAO0033-croppedsmall
  photo credit: http://www.paolascattolon.com

  The short version:

  Sarah Henstra’s latest novel, The Red Word (2018), was published in the US by Grove Atlantic and in Canada by ECW. The UK edition will be published in 2019 by Tramp Press. Her previous novel Mad Miss Mimic (Penguin Canada, 2015) is an historical tale for young adults. Sarah is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University, where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She grew up on the wild, wet coast of British Columbia, but now she lives in Toronto, Ontario with her two sons.

  Sarah’s literary agent is Martha Webb, a partner at CookeMcDermid. For high-resolution headshots and promotional materials, please contact Sarah’s publicists:

  The Red Word (US)- Kathy Daneman at Grove Atlantic: kathy@kathydaneman.com

  The Red Word (Canada)- Sarah Dunn at ECW Press: sarah@ecwpress.com

  Mad Miss Mimic- Vikki VanSickle at Penguin Random House Canada: vvansickle@penguinrandomhouse.com.

  The longer story:Sreading

  I was born in North York, Ontario, but when I was a year old my parents packed me into their VW bug and headed to Abbotsford, BC.

  SandDanIndoors my childhood was books, books, and more books.

  But outdoors? Outdoors there were daily perils and quests in the wilderness. There was a path to school through the woods. A certain fern grew from moss-covered tree trunks, and its root tasted exactly like licorice. We (my three younger brothers and I) wore rain-capes. We sidestepped skunk cabbages and slugs as big as our feet. We hurtled our bikes down the hang-gliding hills and through pastures where cows drank out of old bathtubs. We ate raspberries as big as cherries and cherries as big as plums. Steam sometimes billowed from our local volcano (Mt. Baker, visible across the border in Washington).
  SMcSarah
  Rocking my 1980s McDonald’s uniform.

  We moved back to London, Ontario when I was twelve. High school was the usual series of humiliations and tortures, plus a cornucopia of part-time jobs: corn de-tasseling, tobacco hoeing, waitressing at Red Lobster, circuit-board soldering, taking inventory at a chainsaw company, catering.

  StreeplanterThe job titles grew even more eclectic as I paid my way through university: meal-card complaints officer, tutor, life-drawing model and–for the big bucks–treeplanter in northern Ontario and Manitoba.

  I earned a PhD degree in twentieth-century British literature. My doctoral dissertation examined the idea of unresolved grief, or “unmournable loss,” in three novels: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, and Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. After I graduated I held a post-doctoral fellowship in Public Memory Studies at the University of California, Irvine. All this research eventually became a scholarly monograph: The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth Century English Fiction (Palgrave, 2009).

  Nowadays I’m an English professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, one of the fastest-growing and most diverse campuses in North America. I teach courses in Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Gothic Horror, Creative Writing, and Psychoanalysis & Fiction. I love everything about my job: my curious, creative students, the chance to travel for research and conferences, and the quiet times wandering the library and writing, writing, writing. And more writing.

  IMG_9269For kicks I sing with a fabulous women’s choir called Cantores Celestes, volunteer with the Brockton Writers Series, and meet regularly with other members of the Toronto Women Writers’ Salon. I’m a warm-weather runner, a cold-weather knitter, and an all-weather eater of Miss Vickie’s kettle-cooked potato chips (Canada’s proudest export, IMHO). What really floats my boat is learning new skills, beginning new things. Currently I am a beginner tarot card reader, a beginner shape-note singer, IMG_8002and a beginner pickler.

  Want to know more? Check out the online interview 15 Minutes with Sarah Henstra over at She Does the City.com

  Here’s a sample: Q#7: What makes you happy?

  A: “Lemons. Sunrise. My duvet. My fifteen-year-old son in his Metro grocery courtesy-clerk uniform. Cycling. Notebooks. Most cheeses. Fairy tales. Mail. Vintage dresses. Anything with coconut. Writing every day.”

  drivingbus

  Want to know even more? Ask me!
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• LA Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/sarah-henstra/#!

  Sarah Henstra’s novel The Red Word was published by Grove Atlantic in March 2018. She is also the author of Mad Miss Mimic, a historical novel for young adults, and the scholarly monograph The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction. She is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

• Ryerson University - https://www.ryerson.ca/english/about-us/faculty-and-staff/faculty/henstra-sarah/

  Henstra, Sarah

  Associate Professor; Graduate Practicum Director
  Education:

  BArtsSc (McMaster); MA (UWO); PhD (Toronto)
  Office:

  JOR-1029
  Telephone:

  416-979-5000 ext 6139
  Email Address:

  shenstra@ryerson.ca
  Website:

  http://www.sarahhenstra.com
  Biography:

  I’m a writer and scholar specializing in 20th century British fiction.

  I am the author of two novels: Mad Miss Mimic (Razorbill, 2015), and The Red Word, coming from Grove Atlantic in 2017. Currently I am completing a fiction manuscript titled Dear Little Jo. My monograph, The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction (Palgrave, 2009), examines the narrative effects of unmournable loss in the fiction of such writers as Ford Madox Ford, Doris Lessing, and Jeanette Winterson. Recent scholarly publications include a study of the construction of women’s mourning in British propaganda during WWI, and a pedagogical consideration of Joe Sacco’s “comics journalism.” I am a board member of Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs (CCWWP), and I’m on the steering committee of the 2016 Canadian Writers’ Summit. I teach courses in the novel, the Gothic, fairy tales, women’s fiction, and creative writing.

  Research Interests:

  Public memory and mourning; memorials; (prose) elegy; discourses of social activism; narrative studies; feminism; feminist histories; myths and folklore, archival practices; secret societies.

  View All Biographies

• Humber Literary Review - http://humberliteraryreview.com/in-conversation-sarah-henstra/

  QUOTED: "Personally, I see Mimic as a kind of adaptive strategy that Leo has invented to cope with her stuttering, a performative workaround that allows her to express something, anything, when she’s tongue-tied. It’s not a perfect strategy, of course; it gets her into all kinds of social trouble. But the people who truly care about Leo as a person—Aunt Emma, Archie, and eventually Tom—are also the ones least bothered by her mimicry."

  IN CONVERSATION: Sarah Henstra

  INTERVIEW BY MELANIE J. FISHBANE

  Mad Miss Mimic, Sarah Henstra’s new novel for young adults, is a gorgeous combination of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty. The novel is set amidst the rise of opium use in 19th-century London, with gangs battling to control the drug trade. It imbues the flavour of the Victorian period, while still maintaining a modern tone. Below, author Melanie J. Fishbane interviews Henstra about the book, and about its roots in classic children’s literature.

  This interview has been edited and condensed.
  MJF: The voice of Leo, the young heiress with a gift for mimicry, has the flavour and language of the Victorian period, but still maintains a "modern" feel. What questions emerged while you were fine-tuning her voice?

  SH: I worked really hard to get Leo’s narrative voice right and to keep track of how it changed over the course of her telling her story. I do read (and teach) a lot of nineteenth-century fiction, so creating a pseudo-Victorian syntax and vocabulary in the novel wasn’t a problem. The bigger challenge was finding the right “mood” for Leo’s voice, especially in the opening scenes. I tried to balance Leo’s initial melancholy with more energetic moments, such as her rapport with cousin Archie, but on the whole I aimed for an elegant, dignified, serious and reflective narrative voice to contrast the varied and colourful voices she mimics.

  MJF: In your “Author's Note,” you discuss your research into the life of an upper class young woman in the 1870s, as well as speech disorders and opiate addictions. What emerged first: the idea of taking an upper class woman out of what would be "typical" situations, or these unusual reasons? How did your research inform your fiction?

  SH: Actually, Tom Rampling, the lockpicker, came first. I had this idea of a street-smart, lower class boy who knows all about locks and clockworks and gadgets, and I wondered what would ever bring someone like him into contact with a “lady” like Leo. It was in the process of fantasizing the relationship between these two protagonists that the rest of the characters and plot elements emerged.

  The Black Glove gang’s attacks and Dr. Dewhurst’s secret experiments are a mystery that Leo and Tom solve together over the course of the story. This is Leo’s “external” journey, but I also wanted her to undertake an “internal” journey, and that’s where the stuttering and mimicry elements of the story came in.

  MJF: One of the themes in your novel focuses on the idea of freedom and (in Leo's case) literally speaking one's truth. Every character (even Leo’s upper class suitor, Francis Thornfax) is stuck in a role that is predetermined either by gender or class. Yet other characters, such as Aunt Emma, seem to have found a way around this within the context of the period. How did you navigate this fine line for a YA audience?

  SH: Freedom definitely has a lot to do with voice and self-expression in the novel, but it’s also closely tied to the question of matrimony. I am curious about the marriage contract as a regulatory tool in society. Along with such “modern” institutions as medicine and law in the nineteenth century, marriage was a way of containing and regulating women’s sexuality and public deportment, as well as stabilizing the economies of property and childrearing. Leo initially sees marriage as a route to freedom from her sister’s (and by extension, society’s) scrutiny and censure, but along the way she realizes that marriage—at least to Mr. Thornfax—is a trap. She has to abandon her romantic hopes of being saved from her plight, and the turning point of the story occurs when she makes the scary decision to risk her fiancé’s bad opinion by going out to spy on him and figure things out for herself.

  MJF: Leo has a very special connection with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. There are even scenes reminiscent of the classic, such as the Mad Hatter's tea party and Leo and Francis Thornfax's engagement party. Can you speak to these connections?

  SH: I really like your comparison of the engagement party to the Mad Hatter’s tea party! Leo’s discovery of the truth turns her whole world upside down, yet everyone around her continues to act as if everything is normal. So yes, she feels like she’s fallen down the rabbit hole! I’ve always been a huge fan of the way Lewis Carroll used nonsense to engage in social critique (e.g., of the English school system and rote learning) as well as for the sheer delight of it. When I discovered that Carroll had a severe stutter, some of his writings took on new meaning for me. Alice in Wonderland not only offers Leo a fictional heroine with whom to identify, but it also represents a way for Leo to see past her own speech limitations and the social injunction for young ladies to be strictly literal and sincere.

  MJF: Can we talk about Tom Rampling? He's got a criminal past, yet you make us adore him with his complete appreciation of Leo and sensitivity. How did you approach his character to make him worthy of Leo?

  SH: Tom’s dubious parentage and shoddy upbringing mean that he has no status in society—yet of all the male characters in the novel, he’s the closest we get to a true Gentleman in the traditional literary sense. His actions are driven by higher ideals: duty, honor, honesty, and charity. Though he’s ambitious, his goal isn’t personal wealth or advancement but to provide for his family and to create beautiful things (music boxes). And like a true gentleman he represses his true feelings and thoughts for most of the novel. What’s not to adore?

  MJF: Leo's relationship with Mimic is much like struggling with an addiction or illness. At times, Mimic does take over as a character—as if she is a real person. What were some of the questions that emerged while trying to define Mimic's particular—charms? Were there any "voices" that you enjoyed playing in?

  SH: For me the thrill of those scenes when Mimic busts loose is less about which voice Leo uses and more about the powerful effect she can achieve on her listener(s) via her mimicry. I particularly enjoyed writing the moments when Mimic pierces through Tom’s gentlemanly reserve (there are a few of these!).

  I hadn’t thought about Mimic as a mental health issue in the contemporary sense, although in the novel that’s certainly how others regard Leo’s mimicry. Because she can’t control when she falls into mimicry or whose voice she imitates, people assume she’s the victim either of haunting or hysteria (thus the name “Mad Miss Mimic”). Personally, I see Mimic as a kind of adaptive strategy that Leo has invented to cope with her stuttering, a performative workaround that allows her to express something, anything, when she’s tongue-tied. It’s not a perfect strategy, of course; it gets her into all kinds of social trouble. But the people who truly care about Leo as a person—Aunt Emma, Archie, and eventually Tom—are also the ones least bothered by her mimicry. And it was an important point for me that in the end, it’s not that Mimic disappears or is banished but the opposite: Leo’s mimicry skills extend to her “own” voice, too, so that she can perform her own identity (stutter-free) and take on other roles interchangeably.
  Sarah Henstra is a professor of English at Ryerson University, where she teaches courses in gothic literature, fairy tales, creative writing, and women in fiction. She lives in Toronto with her husband, two sons (one teen, one tween) and a poodle named Nora. Mad Miss Mimic is her first novel.

• 49th Shelf - https://49thshelf.com/Blog/2018/03/262/Sarah-Henstra-on-The-Red-Word

  By Kerry Clare
  tagged : the red word, me too, sarah henstra, campus novels
  Book Cover The Red Word
  Lauded by no less than Tom Perrotta as "the smartest, most provocative novel I’ve read in a long time," The Red Word is Sarah Henstra's second fiction title (after her acclaimed YA debut Mad Miss Mimic), a campus novel set in the 1990s whose politics and preoccupations evoke our current zeitgeist. In many ways The Red Word is a #Me Too book, but its questions are much larger than a hashtag and Henstra has readers grappling with complicated questions about rape culture, culpability, and justice—all the while delivering a gorgeously written novel that's really hard to put down.

  ****

  49th Shelf: It’s always kind of funny when a book is declared as “timely” because it takes years to make a book, and I imagine this one has been in the works for a long time. Could you talk about your own timeline in terms of writing and your road to publication? How timely is this book really?

  Sarah Henstra: That’s true! "Timely" makes it sound like one day you take a look at what’s blowing up Twitter and say "Oh yeah, gonna sit down a sec and write a novel about that." What a terrible plan that would be! Even if by some miracle you write it really fast (which I did not), and get it perfect right out of the gate (which I did not), novels take forever to come into print via traditional publishers—especially if it’s your first one or if you wrote it for a new market (which I did). I started The Red Word in 2013, and sold the book shortly after my YA novel Mad Miss Mimic came out in 2015. Editing and production took even longer than usual—they wanted to coordinate Canadian/US publication dates, get the right blurbs on the jacket, and so on—and I suppose that the long wait worked in the book’s favour, as more and more people have meanwhile become interested in some of the issues it grapples with, such as sexual harassment and violence. That topic was current five years ago when I started writing, but now it’s so buzzworthy that my book is trumpeted as “timely.”

  49th Shelf: And speaking of time, can you talk about the significance of your novel being set in the 1990s? Also, what narrative opportunities and challenges did that period offer you? How would the novel be different if it were set in the present?

  Sarah Henstra: From the start I conceived of this story as a set of events that leaves a lasting and traumatic mark on the novel’s narrator, Karen—so much so that she is compelled to re-visit them, to re-tell the story for herself, fifteen years later (in 2010, when she’s in her mid-30s). In that “present-day” frame, Karen’s long-term relationship has failed and she’s feeling stuck and uninspired in her career; in many respects the past is more lively and real to her than the present. She needs to go back and pick through the wreckage of her college years in order to salvage what was important and let go of the rest, including her own lingering sense of culpability and guilt.

  The 1990s was a time when third-wave feminism took academia by storm. Identity politics, feminist critical theory in the classroom, and grass-roots student activism campaigns made college a heady and exciting place for young women who found their professors and fellow students engaging in very different conversations than they’d been exposed to at home or in high school. I suspect going off to college feels like this in every era—like discovering a brand-new world—but the 1990s was my undergraduate era, and part of the pleasure for me in writing this story was to (re)create, through memory and period detail, that historical moment.

  ”“
  I suspect going off to college feels like this in every era—like discovering a brand-new world—but the 1990s was my undergraduate era, and part of the pleasure for me in writing this story was to (re)create, through memory and period detail, that historical moment.

  49th Shelf: The Red Word is hard work, in the very best way. It complicates binaries, messes with our notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Why was it important for you that this book not be a polemic? And was it difficult to make that happen?

  Sarah Henstra: The Red Word tackles complicated subject matter, so I felt it warranted a complicated treatment. My decision to have the Raghurst women stage their attack on the fraternity the way they do arose from two separate impulses I felt as a writer, one having to do with what story I was telling and the other with how to tell the story. In the 1990s on college campuses (as elsewhere), the dice were so loaded against the survivors of sexual violence that justice seemed an impossible prospect. The young women in the novel are so frustrated with inequality, so sick of recording and reacting to the misdeeds of the frat boys without seeing any real changes, that they believe this is the only way forward, and they’re convinced—for a while, at least—that the ends will justify the means.

  In terms of the story’s structure, I sought a scenario that would leave open the maximum number of possible resolutions in order to allow readers to remain curious and to consider a wide variety of perspectives and points of view. After all, it’s the unexpected consequences of the plot—those surprise moments when events blow up way past the characters’ intentions—that keep us reading.

  I’ve always liked Susan Sontag’s assertion (in her 2004 lecture on South African Novel laureate Nadine Gordimer) that good novelists are "moral agents" precisely because the stories they tell don’t moralize but instead "enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment." It definitely took this book longer to find a publisher because of its lack of a "redemptive" or "hopeful" resolution, though. "What is the takeaway here for feminism?" one editor asked me. Luckily, the editors who strongly connected with it (Amy Hundley at Grove, Susan Renouf at ECW) loved it precisely for its refusal to come down cleanly on one side of the conflict.

  ”“
  It definitely took this book longer to find a publisher because of its lack of a "redemptive" or "hopeful" resolution, though. "What is the takeaway here for feminism?" one editor asked me. Luckily, the editors who strongly connected with it loved it for precisely its refusal to come down cleanly on one side of the conflict.

  49th Shelf: Are there ways in which the current conversation around #MeToo is limiting the way readers are reading your book, or has that conversation broadened (or focused) their attention for such matters?

  Sarah Henstra: That’s a really good question, and I don’t know the whole answer yet (released two weeks ago, The Red Word has only begun finding its readers). I hope my book offers some historical perspective on the current movements in that it puts a pin in the timeline one generation ago—when the issues #MeToo addresses were regularly coming up for discussion but the terms of the discussion weren’t agreed upon at all. For example, in campus dorms and sorority/fraternity houses in the 1990s, the line between “bad sex” or a “mistake” and “sexual assault” was too blurry to see, especially in the case of the blind-drunk, or even passout-drunk, hookup. Nowadays social media today helps to set the terms more effectively and more universally, so that for the first time, rather than isolated groups of women attempting to define sexual violence or consent, we’re all able to participate in the same conversation.

  ”“
  Nowadays social media today helps to set the terms more effectively and more universally, so that for the first time, rather than isolated groups of women attempting to define sexual violence or consent, we’re all able to participate in the same conversation.

  There’s a big gap between conversation and political change, though. In The Red Word the Raghurst women try forcibly to bridge this gap between talk (in the classroom, at the potluck parties) and action (against the fraternity). Without the groundwork for change properly in place, such efforts are doomed from the start. Ideally, today’s hashtag campaigns will generate enough pressure on institutions and legislators that real change happens. I’m hopeful that the movement today will find the necessary momentum and traction that earlier efforts couldn’t quite muster.

  You can probably tell I’ve been getting asked about The Red Word’s relationship to #MeToo a lot lately. Reactions to the story so far seem to break down roughly by age group. Older readers are aghast at the debauched behaviour of my characters, male and female, and even have a hard time suspending their disbelief that campus life could be like this. Middle-agers enjoy seeing their own university experiences mirrored here to varying degrees, and the millennials are disappointed at what the frat boys get away with in my story and want to see more hope for the future.

  ”“
  You can probably tell I’ve been getting asked about The Red Word’s relationship to #MeToo a lot lately.

  Aspects of the book I haven’t had a chance to talk about very much yet, given the #MeToo focus on sexual violence: art-making and photography, the way (Karen’s) grief compels and shapes the story, Greek epic, kinship/friendship, female sexual desire. But it’s still early days…

  49th Shelf: A campus novel seems like a perfect convergence of your respective selves, the fiction writer and the academic. How do your two professional lives inform each other?

  Sarah Henstra: For a long time I kept my fiction writing closeted at school, where I was more publicly focused on academic research and publishing. Creative writing was a private escape from the combined early-career stresses of a heavy teaching load, publish-or-perish, and parenting young children. My first (unpublished) novel was a young adult dystopian fantasy, and I think I steered that way to evade my internalized literary critic. Does every writer have one of those tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, frowning male professors in her mind, asking her who she thinks she is to imagine she could write anything worth its literary salt?—or is it just me, because I spent too many years in classrooms with those guys?

  In any case, I got over it (got over myself, in other words!) through a combination of a few things: one, I discovered that my colleagues at Ryerson are universally supportive of and interested in my fiction. Two, I realized that, since my students are reading YA outside the classroom all the time, they are my audience—so how could my life as a prof ever be separate from my life as a novelist? And three, I saw that as both a prof and a writer I’m deeply invested in and curious about young people, their theatres of study and learning, and the power structures (and imbalances) that shape these theatres.

  ”“
  I saw that as both a prof and a writer I’m deeply invested in and curious about young people, their theatres of study and learning, and the power structures (and imbalances) that shape these theatres.

  To explore these subjects in The Red Word I drew on memory but also my everyday “insider” experiences as a university teacher. A lot has changed since my undergrad years: at least in Toronto, the student body is more diverse and more likely to live at home with parents, commute to school, and work off-campus part time to pay tuition. But universities are still pretty elite places, and a lot of effort still goes into covering up scandals and maintaining a pristine public image.

  49th Shelf: What are some Canadian books and authors that you’re particularly excited about right now?

  Sarah Henstra: Golly, where to start? How to narrow it down?? From the dozens—hundreds?—of Canadian books I can’t shut up about, here’s an arbitrary sampling of five:

  I’ve just started reading Christine Higdon’s novel The Very Marrow of Our Bones, and I’m already enchanted by the dense, moody imagery and the surprising plot turns packed into just the first few chapters.
  I adored Scaachi Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, a collection of bitingly funny essays that consolidates many of the themes she writes about on BuzzFeed: immigrant experience, racism, staying brave in the face of Internet trolls (something at which Koul is an expert), and how rigidly gender is policed both in her ancestral India and the West.
  Kari Maaren’s YA fantasy novel, Weave a Circle Round, achieves that tricky balance between a brainy, rollicking time-travel puzzle-plot and believable characters with relateable emotional experiences. It’s also replete with mythical and literary references that tickle my English-prof fancy; Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” for instance, figures centrally in the plot.
  I’m a big fan of Aaron Tucker’s nerdy/conceptual poetry (he writes gorgeous lyric poems with html-markup language woven through them), and now he’s written a novel I can’t wait to read called Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of the Apocalypse, about the reluctant father of the atomic bomb.
  I got to read a not-final version of Sarah Selecky’s upcoming Radiant Shimmering Light, and this is a title I’ll be shouting from the rooftops! It’s mysterious and sparkly and poignant and hilarious in the same way Selecky’s short stories are (in This Cake Is For the Party), and it portrays the world of online self-empowerment programs (and more to the point, online sales) with uncanny accuracy.

• Hamilton Review of Books - http://hamiltonreviewofbooks.com/danila-botha-interviews-sarah-henstra/

  QUOTED: "Partly I hit on the Greek myth because I wanted something quite radical that they were chewing on. It has been male versus female since the earliest literature in the western world which was the claim that [the characters were] all learning and starting to believe, and [starting to ] see around them everywhere. So for me, going all the way back to Greek myth, was an extreme version of that, even though my own field of expertise is English literature."

  Danila Botha In Conversation with Sarah Henstra
  Photo credit:  http://www.paolascattolon.com
  Photo credit: http://www.paolascattolon.com

  Sarah Henstra is the author of the young adult novel, Mad Miss Mimic, and most recently, the provocative and engaging novel, The Red Word. She is also a professor of English at Ryerson. We had the chance to talk about feminism, subversion, and the secret of slow accumulation.
  Sarah Henstra. The Red Word . ECW Press. $19.95, 400 pp., ISBN: 9781770414242
  Sarah Henstra. The Red Word. ECW Press. $19.95, 400 pp., ISBN: 9781770414242

  Danila Botha: The Red Word is set at an unnamed Ivy League American university in the nineties. Karen Hull, who is Canadian, lives in a house with feminist roomates called Raghurst, and dates a guy from the fraternity next door. I want to start with the interesting connection you made between classic Greek tragedy and current Greek fraternity culture. Tell me how you decided to write about them, and connect them in the novel the way that you did.

  Sarah Henstra: I wanted to capture something that I experience all the time in academia: this amazing sort of belief, or feeling that the things you’re learning about in class have relevance in your life. If students, at an undergrad or graduate level are into what they’re learning, if they have professors who light a fire under them, [they] suddenly see how tantalizing and relevant the material is. I didn’t have that with a Greek mythology class, but I definitely had that with certain classes and professors. I wanted to capture that feeling, that this ancient, dead material can start to crackle and come alive and feel like it deeply matters in the present moment in today’s world. So I invented this class in the book called Women and Myth. And I invented this professor, Dr. Sylvia Esterhazy, who combines this knowledge of classics with Second/Third wave feminist beliefs. It wasn’t that I had a life long abiding interest in Greek myth, but I did want to create a course that all these female students could be taking that gives them a common vocabulary for understanding all the experiences that are happening to them in the book. Partly I hit on the Greek myth because I wanted something quite radical that they were chewing on. It has been male versus female since the earliest literature in the western world which was the claim that [the characters were] all learning and starting to believe, and [starting to ] see around them everywhere. So for me, going all the way back to Greek myth, was an extreme version of that, even though my own field of expertise is English literature.

  DB: What was the writing process like? I imagine it must have been hard to switch between something relatively contemporary, and a style that is very classic. That must have required a lot of research to properly capture.

  SH: The book went through major plot revisions. When I wrote the first draft, I had some of the Greek elements; for example, the book began with the invocation to the muse, and I had this idea of a kind of Greek chorus in the dialogue, but then I took it all out. (laughs)

  I was revising it and polishing it for my first reader, my agent. I’m generally very private about my first drafts.

  Basically the things I held back on, taking out the Greek stuff when I sent it to my agent, was because I judged myself. I thought, this is just pretentious literary stuff, I only did it for my own pleasure, and now I’ve got to kill all my darlings and take it out. So I did, and I left just a little bit in. And the first thing my agent and my editor said was “We want this. This is where the book is really, really interesting.” So I put it all back in the book. I’d thought I was being too professorial, or cerebral or something, that I was taking away from the moment of the story, so I was happy when I felt that the things that I thought were sparky and dangerous and interesting, from an aesthetic as well as a political perspective, and a content one, were the things that made the book sing.

  I thought, readers might not agree with it, they might not be comfortable, but it’ll stir things up, and it’ll feel energetic.

  DB: Did you have other first readers, besides your agent?

  SH: I find that the best writing that I’m capable of doing comes when I set myself a kind of dare or challenge to follow at the limit of my writing ability, and I push myself to follow it all the way through to its logical conclusion. Only then do I show it to someone else. The whole time that person is reading it, I’m thinking there’s a really good chance that this isn’t going to work, that I’m not going to be able to pull this off, that I’m going to have to rewrite this entire thing. In order for me to commit to the dare, a hundred percent and not waiver, if I let somebody read it too soon, I’d be way too inclined to compromise or try to please. In order for me to take risks as a creative writer, I can’t also be thinking about what the right answer is. My pleaser personality is the antithesis of what I need to draw on to take creative risks.

  DB: Let’s talk about some of the characters in the book. I really liked Charla. The idea of being so in command of your body, that you would try to use it and try to be the master of your own exploitation for a greater purpose, feels in some ways quite in keeping with current fourth wave feminism.

  SH: That’s a really astute observation which I haven’t heard yet. Charla stands apart from the other characters in terms of her attitude towards Dr. Esterhazy and the class. She stands apart from the other women in the house in that she’s not at the forefront of the marches, she tries to stay out of the spotlight that they shine so brightly on the exploitative culture. She is calling her own shots, about her own desire and her body in a different way than the other characters are comfortable with. I tried to really portray that. The narrator’s attitude towards her is she is overwhelmed by her. She rhapsodizes about how Charla lit a fire in her brain. Charla talks about freedom in the present tense; Karen is still trying to figure that out.

  In terms of feminism, Charla is the most contemporary character in the book. She’s looking forward to an era beyond entrenched [thinking]. The characters in the nineties don’t know what to do with her, but I think that’s still true. When we have conversations about consent on campus, and sexual violence and education on campus, it’s still very difficult, and I’m speaking here as an educator who is part of contemporary campus culture. It’s very hard to talk about equality and safety and consent because the conversation is still focused on male desire.

  If we’re totally focused on protecting ourselves from the desires of men, and trying to police male desire, and criminalize it, and call it out, get it off our bodies, it still always puts men in the centre. Charla is less interested in that. She’s deeply curious about her own sexuality and women in general, and women’s desire. She’s not as interested in Dyann’s objectives, which makes those characters drift all the way apart.

  There was a lot of discussion in the editing process of Charla — shouldn’t there be some kind of consequence for her? But she slips out of the plot, she’s off in the world, enjoying a freedom that the other characters in various ways aren’t.

  DB: I also want to talk more Dyann. She’s a fascinating, galvanizing force, especially since Karen admires her so much. She has so much conviction, but also she pushes things far beyond their natural limit.

  SH: Dyann has this singularity of vision, this purpose throughout the book. She wants to create her own mythology, and change what it means to be a woman. She wants to take all the discourse and turn it on its head. I was interested in Dyann as an extremist. For her, human relationships, or the subtleties of how she feels about someone, don’t change her ideological orientation. There are people like that, and they create consequences in the world. She’s wrongheaded about things in a way that she can’t see. She changes course a few times. She decides to take ownership at the end when she tells her whole story to the reporter.

  DB: The book definitely made me uncomfortable in certain places. The Susan Sontag quote you mentioned in your 49th Shelf interview settled it for me a little bit: “I’ve always liked Susan Sontag’s assertion (in her 2004 lecture on South African Novel laureate Nadine Gordimer) that good novelists are 'moral agents' precisely because the stories they tell don’t moralize but instead 'enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.'"

  SH: I’m glad. I believe that quite deeply about literature, that its responsibility isn’t to direct us as to what to think, but to expand the possibilities for thinking and feeling. Part of what can be an uncomfortable reading for me, too, is the reminder that it’s the job of art to disturb you, to provoke you, to force you to think about things in a new way, that you maybe can get away with shielding yourself from in real life.

  DB: Is it hard for you when people critique the subversive elements? Like for example, if someone wondered to what end you’d written what happens to the characters —what that violence says about our culture, our society, where we are?

  SH: It’s totally understandable. I was raised in the Christian Reform Church, and my parents are still involved with it. That’s exactly their question for me: some works of art and books lead us towards darkness and some lead us towards the light, and does your book lead us towards darkness or light? It’s a moral question about the responsibility of the artist to her community, and her family and her upbringing. As an artist, do you bring more light into the world, or do you potentially bring darkness into the world, by highlighting or exposing or capitalizing on something dark, and then what do we do with a book like that? So yeah, I recognize that question. It’s a question that I’ve had to set really firmly to one side for myself in order to write anything at all. Because if you’re thinking about audience and pleasing and jumping hoops, your hands are tied before you even start. Then the outcomes have been determined.

  DB: You address class and critique privilege with so much depth within the story. What has the response been from the younger generation of readers and feminists?

  SH: There’s been a response from a few younger readers of frustration that the fraternity got away with all the things at the end. They wanted more success on the part of the female characters in taking down the frat. They saw all of that behavior as horrifying, that a male student could call out to a female student and rate them as they walked by on the street. They were horrified in a way that people of my generation are not, simply because we recognize it so much. There’s this sense that there’s no way they could get away with this stuff anymore. So the fact that nothing happened to this guy, Alec, other than he got kicked out of the frat, they find that really hard to believe. One piece that they’re missing is, yeah there are stories in The New Yorker of a student carrying her mattress around the stage at graduation because her assailant had not been kicked off campus, but I mean, he’s graduating, too. We have a culture now, where things are being publicized and talked about, but it’s not the case that justice is automatically being served.

  I did a lot of thinking and writing in and around the question of intersectionality. What about women of colour? Two groups are sharing the women’s space in the story. There are the students of colour alliance, and the women’s centre.

  I was trying to be faithful to what Karen’s politics would have been like in the nineties. That was just around the time when racialized minority groups were starting to accuse mainstream feminists of racism and elitism and classism. This is an Ivy League school in this novel. Class is a huge issue, there’s an elitism that becomes the silent backdrop. So many other hierarchies and imbalances of power are conveniently swept aside. These young women are saying, it’s all about gender, and at one point their professor says it’s about which parents can afford to send their kids there. And she’s deflecting, but it’s also true, but they’re a tiny group of privileged white kids.

  DB: Can we talk about the decision to set the story in the States, versus setting it in Canada? It’s interesting because aside from Karen, you also have a French Canadian character.

  SH: I think Canadian fraternity culture has inherited its traditions from American fraternity culture. There are fewer private universities and more publically funded ones in Canada. Greek culture is such a phenomenon in the US, fraternities and sororities provide something like 75% of student housing in the States. They’re hugely entwined with university structure, not to mention all the massive alumni dollars that come in through fraternity chapters.

  I did a post doctorate at UC Irvine [in California] and I was past the age when I would be really immersed in frat culture or sorority culture, but I saw it. I was thinking about these things when I wanted to write about campus life. I wanted a universal setting, in the sense of a college campus. I wanted to include enough detail that people feel like they’re in a real place.

  In terms of specificity, the place I was looking for didn’t need to be located in Hamilton, or Toronto. In part, from a publication perspective, it was strategic. I wanted a US publisher for this book. And I thought, if I can write a story that doesn’t feel specifically Canadian, and in this case I felt that this story didn’t need to be a specifically Canadian story, I could do that because an American publisher would be able to envision an American audience being interested in this book.

  DB: Do you feel like you grew into that kind of confidence, in terms of your ambitions as a writer? Or were you always aware of the scope you wanted your work to reach?

  SH: Just in case anyone thinks I hit it out of the park from the beginning, I went through tons of rejection. I had a New York agent, and a book on submission for almost three years. I revised for a big American press on spec, meaning no commitment, they just said change the whole thing, and we’ll look again, and I did. I spent eighteen months revising it, and they said nah, and the agent stopped calling back. It was a long crushing period of getting nowhere.

  Even with The Red Word I had twenty-eight rejections for that book. It took more than eight months to find a publisher in the States. I felt like it was this endless grind of rejection that I had to weather and stay positive (about), but my agent didn’t feel like it was a big deal at all. It was all a matter of perspective. I find that in my own circle of writers that I hang out with and know, the ones who have success are the ones who are resilient, who don’t take no for an answer.

  DB: Is there something that you tell yourself or that you’ve heard when you’re struggling to write? My all time favourite quote is from Alison Pick. I keep it on my desk: “Just remember that every book that you’ve ever read, and loved started with a bad first draft.”

  SH: That’s great. I love that. A big part of what made it possible for me to become a writer was learning what it means to have a writing practice. In the same way that one would have a meditation practice, or a yoga practice — for me it’s not so much project based and outcome based, as it is practice based. It just means I show up, almost everyday, and I write. I get bad ideas and good ideas, but I just show up and do my practice and that is how you access the magic of slow accumulation. Writing a novel, as you know, is like a massive long haul of a project, and how do you ever get that done? You do it little by little, year after year.

  There was a breakthrough moment for me, when I was super busy with teaching, and my kids were younger, and I was not ever finding that day off, when I could sit down and write for a day. Right?

  DB: Totally.

  SH: I had these week-long writing retreats that I wanted to schedule, but they never worked out. I managed to do some math, and that made me realize, if I wrote two hundred and fifty words a day, I would have a novel at the end of the year. I thought, two hundred and fifty words? I can do that! That’s a page, I could write that on the streetcar, and when I realized that, that to me was the secret of slow accumulation. Yeah, it’s going to take a long time, but that’s a year, and the year before that I didn’t write a novel, so how about I try this year? People ask me how I do it with a full time job. I just do it really, really slowly.
  IMG_1875.jpg
  Danila Botha is a fiction writer based in Toronto. Her first collection of short stories, Got No Secrets was published in 2010, and was named one of Britannica’s Books of the Year (Canadian short stories). Her first novel, Too Much on the Inside was shortlisted for the 2016 Relit Award and won a Book Excellence Award for Contemporary Novel. Her most recent collection of short stories, For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I've Known was a finalist for the 2017 Trillium Book Awards and was shortlisted for the Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, and most recently, the ReLit Awards. Danila teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, and at Humber College’s School for Writers. She is currently working on her second novel and on a new collection of short stories.

QUOTED: "an aesthetically arresting interrogation of rape culture on campus."
"timely and brilliant."

Henstra, Sarah: THE RED WORD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Henstra, Sarah THE RED WORD Black Cat/Grove (Adult Fiction) $16.00 3, 13 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2655-9
An aesthetically arresting interrogation of rape culture on campus.
Like many an epic tale, this is the story of a war between two great houses. On one side there is the fraternity Gamma Beta Chi, also known as "Gang Bang Central." On the other, Raghurst, the home of a collective of radical feminists. Sophomore Karen Huls lands between these two extremes when she wakes up in the backyard Gamma Beta Chi shares with Raghurst and remembers, "I had sex with somebody." The "red word" of the title is rape, "a double-sided axe brandished in a circle over the head." This novel is, among other things, an interrogation of what that word means and whom it hurts. Karen moves into Raghurst, dazzled by the heady discourse of her new housemates and the charismatic professor who serves as their mentor. But she is also an insider at GBC--she's dating one brother and intensely, irrationally attracted to another. As a plan to expose the frat as an epicenter of violent misogyny spirals out of control, Karen is caught in the middle. And she is the first to ask the question that becomes the central theme of this book: "Are the right people suffering?" (e.g., being punished). This is also a question that hangs over Classical tragedy. The women of Raghurst are keenly interested in the ways in which myth shapes reality, and Henstra's text is shot through with antique allusions. The narrative begins with an invocation of the muse. There are references to Artemis and Maenads and Medusa, female figures who pose a threat to men by transgressing the rules that govern women. Helen of Troy becomes a sort of mirror for Karen as she explores the limits and possibilities of female agency in a patriarchal world. And, at moments of high drama, Henstra's language echoes Homer. Dyann Brooks-Morriss, Raghurst's leader, is "battlethirsty" and "redglistening." Bruce Comfort, the frat brother who fuels Karen's fantasies, is given epithets like "heavengoing" and "goldbright."
Timely and brilliant.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Henstra, Sarah: THE RED WORD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461529/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0cca26b9. Accessed 26 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461529

QUOTED: "The novel raises essential questions surrounding class privilege, rape, and gendered power dynamics on campus."

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The Red Word
Publishers Weekly.
265.3 (Jan. 15, 2018): p35. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Red Word
Sarah Henstra. Black Cat, $16 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2655-9
Young adult author Henstra's first adult outing is an incisive campus novel. Set in the mid-'90s, the story follows a group of four sorority-bashing, fraternity-loathing ultrafeminists at an unnamed Ivy League university, most of them lesbians who live in an off-campus house they nickname Raghurst. Karen, a Canadian, becomes the girls' fifth housemate and distinguishes herself from the pack by dating Mike, a member of one of the most notorious fraternities, Gamma Beta Chi. When word gets around that the good-looking Bruce Comfort, another Gamma Beta Chi, got a girl on campus pregnant and refuses to take responsibility, Raghurst ringleader Dyann concocts a plan to roofie the fraternity at their own party. But a female party goer gets caught in the crossfire and gang-raped after accidentally consuming the drug. The result is a campuswide debate about what exactly happened that night and who is responsible. Henstra portrays Greek life in a harsh light and doesn't hold back when describing the excessive drunkenness, debauchery, and deplorable misogynistic attitudes at Gamma Beta Chi. Though the parts of the story that take place 15 years in the future seem underdeveloped and a few aspects of the Raghurst-vs.-Gamma Beta Chi saga don't fully ring true, the novel raises essential questions surrounding class privilege, rape, and gendered power dynamics on campus. Agent: Monica Pacheao, the McDermid Agency. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Red Word." Publishers Weekly, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888869/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f75496b4. Accessed 26 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523888869

QUOTED: "a timely and nuanced dissection of rape culture."

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The Red Word
Eugenia Williamson
Booklist.
114.6 (Nov. 15, 2017): p23+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Red Word.
By Sarah Henstra.
Mar. 2018.352p. Black Cat, paper, $16 (9780802126559).
Set in the 1990s, The Red Word interrogates the prevailing political preoccupations of that time: gender politics, third-wave feminism, and consent. Henstra (Mad Miss Mimic, 2017) sets her first novel for adults at an East Coast college. Told from the perspective of a Canadian named Karen looking back on her time as a horny undergraduate, the book follows a group of incredibly earnest young women as enamored with feminist theory as they are with their own cleverness. Karen and her friends live in a shared house they call Raghurst, where they spend their time gossiping, dissecting the male gaze, and dabbling in Wicca. Raghurst abuts a frat house nicknamed Gang Bang Central, where Karen finds a reasonably witty boyfriend named Mike and where, rumor has it, the fraternity engages in some very unsavory extracurriculars. As it happens, Gang Bang Central lives up to its name. When the bros victimize a Raghurst associate, Karen must literally and figuratively confront her role in patriarchal oppression. A timely and nuanced dissection of rape culture ensues.--Eugenia Williamson
YA: Teens understand rape culture, and they'll understand the characters' confusion in the face of it. EW.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williamson, Eugenia. "The Red Word." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 23+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441725/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=407f6689. Accessed 26 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517441725

QUOTED: "Henstra has captured the period perfectly. ... Her ear for dialogue and class differentiation is as spot on as Leonora's mimicry. Mad Miss Mimic has much to offer as a window onto Victorian society."

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Henstra, Sarah: Mad Miss Mimic
Patricia Jermey
Resource Links.
20.5 (June 2015): p26. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2015 Resource Links http://www.atcl.ca
Full Text:
HENSTRA, Sarah
Mad Miss Mimic [G]
Razorbill, 2015. 255p. Gr. 8-12. 978-014-319236-7. Pbk. $16.00
Sarah Henstra is a professor whose specialty is the role of women, gothic literature, and fairy tales. This novel is clearly the happy coincidence of her professional expertise and personal interest. Leonora Somerville is a seven teen-year-old heiress, recommended to Victorian London society for her wealth and beauty. However her stutter and irrepressible vocal mimicry have frightened away potential suitors. Her sister, married to a successful older doctor, is becoming frustrated with Leo's inability to play the role of submissive mate, seen but not heard. The longer Leo lives with her sister, the more the tension builds, especially when Leo learns that her sister's husband is using poor orphans as guinea pigs for his medical experiments with various forms of opium. Tom Rampling, the doctor's clever young assistant, does what he can do to prevent injury, but several young people have already died at the doctor's hands.
When Leo is introduced to the dashing and wealthy Francis Thomfax, it seems the perfect partnership. His generous gifts and impeccable manners are enough to win her affection; when his father is killed in an explosion, he is elevated to his father's title and position in the House of Lords. London society celebrates the brilliant match, with the exception of Leo's Aunt Emmaline, who has always been an independent thinker. But when Tom and Leo connect the dots, Thomfax is revealed as a cruel fraud, responsible for the death of his father and others, and profiting from the opium addiction created by the doctor. Now Leo and Tom must find a way to cross the vast
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social gulf which separates them.
Henstra has captured the period perfectly, especially the female experience. Her detailed research is shown in a wide variety of areas: medicine, business, politics, journalism, clothing, housekeeping, to name a few. Her ear for dialogue and class differentiation is as spot on as Leonora's mimicry. Mad Miss Mimic has much to offer as a window onto Victorian society.
Thematic Links: Victorian England; Opium Use and Addiction; Romance; Historical Fiction
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jermey, Patricia. "Henstra, Sarah: Mad Miss Mimic." Resource Links, June 2015, p. 26. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A421624412/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=6f674cf9. Accessed 26 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A421624412

QUOTED: "A colourful cast of secondary characters help set the stage for this highly engaging saga, and while the end may not be entirely unexpected, it is wholly satisfying."

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Mad Miss Mimic
Lisa Doucet
Canadian Children's Book News.
38.3 (Summer 2015): p35+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2015 Canadian Children's Book Centre http://www.bookcentre.ca/publications/canadian_childrens_book_news
Full Text:
Mad Miss Mimic written by Sarah Henstra Razorbill Canada, 2015
978-0-14-319236-7 (pb) $16.00
978-0-14-319238-1 (eBook) $10.99
for Grades 8 to 12
Fiction / Adventure / Victorian England / Stuttering / Opium Trade
Words have never come easily to Leonora (Leo) Somerville, whose stuttering has long been a source of shame for her. She also suffers from another peculiar speech affliction: the unnatural ability to perfectly imitate voices, to repeat entire speeches precisely as they were first uttered. For this reason, she is often referred to as "Mad Miss Mimic." Also for this reason, her sister despairs of ever finding a man who will marry Leo. But when rich and handsome Francis Thornfax begins to court her, it appears that Leo has finally met someone who is smitten with her in spite of her speech impediment. At last, she dares to believe that she might find love. But there are sinister goings-on in Victorian London, where an opium gang is spreading terror as they stage bombings throughout the city. Leo inadvertently finds herself in the midst of these dark machinations when she finds herself drawn to Tom Rampling, her brother-in-law's low-born assistant. As she slowly pieces together the terrible truth about those around her, she realizes that she must finally find a way to make her own voice heard.
First-time novelist Sarah Henstra has crafted a richly compelling tale filled with romance and
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intrigue. She brings Victorian London vividly to life, capturing the sights and sounds and smells of the city as well as the dramatic contrast between the lifestyles of the upper crust and the lowly poor. Leo is a realistically rendered protagonist whose uncertainties and fears make her more believable, but whose growing determination to seek the truth demonstrates a courage and strength of spirit that will further endear her to readers. A colourful cast of secondary characters help set the stage for this highly engaging saga, and while the end may not be entirely unexpected, it is wholly satisfying.
Lisa Doucet is Co-Manager of Woozles, the Halifax bookstore.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Doucet, Lisa. "Mad Miss Mimic." Canadian Children's Book News, Summer 2015, p. 35+. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A473630182/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=4b9d95d1. Accessed 26 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473630182
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Mad Miss Mimic
Best Books for Kids & Teens.
(Fall 2015): p27. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Canadian Children's Book Centre http://www.bookcentre.ca/publications/best_books_for_kids_and_teens
Full Text:
* Mad Miss Mimic
Written by Sarah Henstra
Toronto: Razorbill Canada, 2015
[] $16.00 PB 978-0-14-319236-7
[] $10.99 EB 978-0-14-319238-1 259 pages, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2"
IL: Ages 12 and up RL: Grades 7-8
It's London, 1872, and 17-year-old heiress Leonora (Leo) Somerville is plagued by an unrelenting stutter that vanishes only when she imitates other people's voices. Courted by handsome Francis Thornfax, she can't shake the feeling that something is wrong. The Black Glove opium gang is bombing London, and Leo suspects that Mr. Thornfax, her brother-in-law, and his assistant Tom are involved. Leo investigates, only to discover the one thing she most desperately desires: her voice.
VICTORIAN ERA | MYSTERY | LONDON, ENGLAND | ROMANCE | SEXUAL AWAKENING | INTRIGUE | VOICES
Things to look for:
* A star * and a title appearing in red text signify titles of exceptional calibre. * NE signifies a new edition of a previously selected BBKT title.
* Interest Level (IL) is listed by age.
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* Reading Level (RL) is listed by grade.
* The Thematic Links list subject headings for each book.
* The check boxes [] make it easy for you to keep track of the books that interest you. Binding Code:
BD Board
EB eBook
HC Hardcover
HC (jacket) Hardcover with jacket
HC (jacket & PLC) Hardcover with jacket and picture laminated to cover
LIB Reinforced library binding
PB Paperback
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mad Miss Mimic." Best Books for Kids & Teens, Fall 2015, p. 27. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A473691011/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f6e7904f. Accessed 26 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473691011
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A timeless story of youthful idealism;
Sarah Henstra's The Red Word
chronicles students' debates
The Toronto Star (Toronto, Ontario).
(Mar. 31, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: pE11. From Infotrac Newsstand.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A timeless story of youthful idealism; Sarah Henstra's The Red Word chronicles students'
debates." Toronto Star [Toronto, Ontario], 31 Mar. 2018, p. E11. Infotrac Newsstand, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533096428/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2e6312e4. Accessed 26 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533096428
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"Henstra, Sarah: THE RED WORD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461529/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0cca26b9. Accessed 26 May 2018. "The Red Word." Publishers Weekly, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888869/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f75496b4. Accessed 26 May 2018. Williamson, Eugenia. "The Red Word." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 23+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441725/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=407f6689. Accessed 26 May 2018. Jermey, Patricia. "Henstra, Sarah: Mad Miss Mimic." Resource Links, June 2015, p. 26. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A421624412/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6f674cf9. Accessed 26 May 2018. Doucet, Lisa. "Mad Miss Mimic." Canadian Children's Book News, Summer 2015, p. 35+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A473630182/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4b9d95d1. Accessed 26 May 2018. "Mad Miss Mimic." Best Books for Kids & Teens, Fall 2015, p. 27. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A473691011/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f6e7904f. Accessed 26 May 2018. "A timeless story of youthful idealism; Sarah Henstra's The Red Word chronicles students' debates." Toronto Star [Toronto, Ontario], 31 Mar. 2018, p. E11. Infotrac Newsstand, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533096428/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2e6312e4. Accessed 26 May 2018.

• Historical Novel Society
  https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/mad-miss-mimic/
  Word count: 321

  QUOTED: "Henstra is effective in evoking the world of Victorian England. Leo is a dynamic character. ... The climax is exciting, and the romance satisfying."

  Mad Miss Mimic

  By Sarah Henstra
  Find & buy on

  1872. Leonora Somerville is an heiress with a stutter. The only time she can talk without stuttering is when she mimics others, something she seems to have no control over. Her strange outbursts have caused havoc, scaring away female friends and male suitors. Thus, Leo mostly stays silent. Leo lives in London with her sister, Christabel, who is possibly addicted to the special laudanum potion her husband, Dr. Dewhurst, makes. Christabel is a social climber now trying to find a husband for Leo. The rich and handsome Francis Thornfax begins courting Leo; he is not put off by Leo’s silence or stuttering. Nor is Tom, the clever assistant to Dr. Dewhurst who pops in and out of Leo’s life. London quakes in fear of the violent Black Glove, an organization apparently opposed to the opium trade. Thornfax, Dr. Dewhurst, Tom, and Leo’s journalist cousin all seem somehow linked to the deadly group.

  Henstra is effective in evoking the world of Victorian England. Leo is a dynamic character. Lacking self-confidence at the beginning, Leo’s strong sense of right and wrong causes her to step forward when needed. Clues enabled me to guess what was happening with the black glove, the opium trade, and the men involved before Leo, but I didn’t know what she would do or how it would all play out. The climax is exciting, and the romance satisfying. Leo is seventeen, and the book is apparently targeted at the young adult audience. This surprised me, not because it would be inappropriate for teens, but because it is just the sort of adult historical novel I seek and enjoy.
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• Now
  https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/books/review-mad-miss-mimic-by-sarah-henstra/
  Word count: 431

  QUOTED: "It's the thriller aspect that keeps the story moving, and Henstra has a firm grip on how to develop a narrative that keeps you guessing."

  Review: Mad Miss Mimic by Sarah Henstra

  Fun mimic

  by Susan G. Cole

  June 10, 2015

  7:29 PM
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  BOOKSLA_BOOKSReview_px626.jpg

  MAD MISS MIMIC by Sarah Henstra (Razorbill/Penguin), 259 pages, $16 paper. Rating: NNN

  Rarely do I dip into so-called young- adult fiction, but I changed my ways when Mad Miss Mimic crossed my desk for a number of reasons. It's written by Ryerson prof Sarah Henstra, whose specialty is women in fiction. And besides, the genre is having a spectacular influence on pop culture in general.

  I'm glad I did. Mad Miss Mimic is a very entertaining thriller, with deep period detail - it's set in 1872 London, England - and a feminist twist.

  On the surface, heiress Leonora Somerville lives a life of privilege, thanks to her good looks and money, mainly. But she has an embarrassing, serious stammer, and, more problematic, the speech disorder enables her to be a perfect mimic. Voices of relatives, servants, ladies and lords can come out of her mouth at any time, especially when she's experiencing stress, much to the mortification of her family.

  The perfect suitor arrives in the form of Francis Thornfax, handsome, wealthy and not at all bothered by Leonora's speech impediment. But he may be too good to be true, and his interest in her brother-in-law's medical practice, in which morphine figures prominently, is suspect.

  Henstra factors in political intrigue - Parliament is considering an opium ban - and terrorism, while her secondary characters are skilfully drawn: Leonora's socially ambitious sister Christa, whose fondness for laudanum is getting out of hand; the servant Tom, to whom Leonora is attracted; and her rascal journalist cousin Archie.

  But it's the thriller aspect that keeps the story moving, and Henstra has a firm grip on how to develop a narrative that keeps you guessing.

  I wish she'd revealed when Leonora developed her persistent stutter or if was triggered by something in particular. But maybe she's imagining a revealing trilogy. (Doesn't every Y.A. author?)

  Either way, if Mad Miss Mimic is an indicator of what's in young readers' hands - and you don't have to be in that demographic to enjoy it - the future looks good.

  susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
  Tags Sarah Henstra

• IFOA
  http://ifoa.org/2018/blog/womens-history-month-with-the-red-words-sarah-henstra
  Word count: 1107

  QUOTED: "I was interested in the clash between ideas and real life that can happen to university students when they begin to learn about “big ideas” in the classroom—those world-changing philosophies and political ideologies that inspire dissatisfaction with the status quo—and at the same time are let loose from their parents’ and teachers’ supervision for the first time and tend to go a bit wild. Pitting the radical sisters against the fraternity brothers was a way for me to explore this ideas-vs.-practice tension in real time, in the dramatic space of the story."

  Writing Women’s History: An Interview with The Red Word’s Sarah Henstra
  Mar 01

  Women's March

  Online movements like #MeToo have forced an important conversation on power, consent, sexual harassment and assault into the spotlight which has led to real world actions like the Times Up Legal Defense Fund.

  As it’s the first day of Women’s History Month, we wanted to take the time to chat with author Sarah Henstra ahead of her Toronto Lit Up book launch on March 8th.

  Henstra’s arresting novel, The Red Word, is set on an American campus where a Canadian sophomore, Karen Huls, deals with the conflict of dating a member of the Gamma Beta Chi fraternity while living with the radical feminists of the Raghurst house. We asked Henstra why she chose to write about rape culture, and campus culture, in her book:

  SH: “I was interested in the clash between ideas and real life that can happen to university students when they begin to learn about “big ideas” in the classroom—those world-changing philosophies and political ideologies that inspire dissatisfaction with the status quo—and at the same time are let loose from their parents’ and teachers’ supervision for the first time and tend to go a bit wild. Pitting the radical sisters against the fraternity brothers was a way for me to explore this ideas-vs.-practice tension in real time, in the dramatic space of the story.”

  henstra-the-red-wordIt’s true. The novel explored the shifting and differing perspectives of its female characters on what feminism is and should look like in practice. So what was it like writing all of those perspectives?

  SH: “I’ve been a feminist scholar for three decades now, so I’ve seen firsthand a lot of the debates and changes in feminist thinking. The argument of feminism is breathtakingly simple: women deserve to be taken as seriously as men. Most people can get on board with that idea, right?

  But how to go about transforming the political, economic and cultural structures which prevent the idea from being a reality—that’s where feminism necessarily explodes into a kaleidoscope of analyses, debates, proposals, programs, curricula, campaigns, and so on. It was a lot of fun for me to recreate some of the discussions I’ve had over the years with other feminists, and to develop a cast of characters who are actively trying out these disparate ideas, trying to put them into practice (for better and for worse!).”

  Henstra references Greek mythology a lot within her book but also in how the narrative is structured. We wanted to know, in the spirit of Greek myths, what she foresees in 2018 with regards to feminism.

  SH: “Uh oh, prophecy! A dangerous enterprise even for the ancient Greeks: Tiresias was blinded and Kassandra was universally disbelieved and considered insane. That said, I think it’s safe enough to predict that the #MeToo movement has achieved some traction now and will lead to positive changes in legislation and social policy.

  In particular, on university campuses, I predict that we’ll at least see a decrease in the number of incapacitated rapes—sexual assaults on blackout-drunk, sleeping, unconscious, or passed-out women (a staggering 1 in 6 female freshmen are subjected to this, according to a 2015 study). If young men were ever fuzzy on whether it was okay to do this, consent education is now making it crystal clear that it is not. I’m aware that this is a pretty low bar, and I’m hopeful it will keep rising.”

  From the 2017 Women’s Marches to the current #MeToo movement, female voices are being amplified to express their outrage over constant inaction. Solving these issues will require ongoing social and political conversations that will extend far beyond the month of March. We hope Sarah Henstra’s provocative first novel will be a facilitator for thought-provoking dialogue, and will inspire readers to spark meaningful conversations of their own.

  Before you disembark, here are some fun bonus questions we asked Henstra:
  On women who inspired her book or who’ve inspired her personallySexual Personae by Camille Paglia.

  SH: “Many of my own professors and fellow students, both in undergraduate and grad school, served as inspiration for the characters in the book. I was never taught by a Dr. Esterhazy (the charismatic feminist professor in the novel), exactly, but I was hugely supported and inspired by the generation of feminists that came before me in academia.

  Camille Paglia wrote a massive, brilliant and controversial book called Sexual Personae in the 1990s about male vs. female archetypes in mythology and art (in it she calls Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”). I re-read this book as food and fuel for The Red Word. Same with Gloria Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With Wolves, which is mentioned in the novel a couple of times.”

  On who she would bring to our world from Greek mythology

  SH: The goddess Artemis (Diana to the Romans) would be a badass force for feminism and environmentalism nowadays. She’s the indomitable huntress unerring with her bow and arrow, protector of the forest animals and pre-pubescent girls.

  In The Red Word, Artemis is figured as Dyann Brooks-Morriss, the boldest and most fearless of the young women who plot to get fraternities banned on campus. Her extremism gets her into trouble in the novel, but I wanted her character to be as epic and memorable to readers as she was to the story’s main character, Karen.

  sarah-henstra-cr-paola-scattolonSarah Henstra is a professor of English at Ryerson University. She is the author of the young adult novel Mad Miss Mimic. This is her first work of adult fiction. She lives in Toronto. Photo credit: Paola Scattolon
  Posted in Blog.
  Tagged ECW Press, Feminism, Sarah Henstra, The Red Word.

• Navi Review
  https://thenavireview.com/2018/03/10/the-red-word-by-sarah-henstra/
  Word count: 1231

  QUOTED: "The Red Word was a fantastic debut novel from Henstra. ... If there was ever a novel to sit around and discuss ad nauseam, it’s this one. It raised brave questions and turned the typical 'college trajectory into adulthood' story on its head. There was nothing predictable about this novel."

  The Red Word by Sarah Henstra
  Posted on March 10, 2018 by The Navi Review
  Paperback, 352 pages
  Expected publication: March 13th 2018 by Grove Press, Black Cat
  A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry–particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed “Gang Bang Central” and a prominent contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture–but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.

  The Red Word captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics and the headlong rush of youth toward new friends, lovers, and life-altering ideas. With strains of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Alison Lurie’s Truth and Consequences, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Sarah Henstra’s debut adult novel arrives on the wings of furies.

  O sing of the American student body, glorious and young. We are the future!…Everyone on a university campus is equally young. We are all the same social class…We all wear the same clothes and listen to the same music…We are all giddy and hyperventilating in the superoxygenated atmosphere of attention and information and privilege and power. We all thought we were different but we weren’t. We all thought we were resisting something but we weren’t. We all thought that life would be like this forever but it wouldn’t. We were going to spend the rest of our lives trying and failing to re-create this feeling of urgency, of specialness, of being smack at the epicenter of everything important and real happening in the world. For the rest of our lives we would yearn for this feeling of exigency and belonging and fullness and passion. From here on in, it would be nostalgia.

  Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word pulsates with the tangible feel of a truly undergraduate experience – in many ways, my experience anyway. From the scraping of coins together for packets of Ramen noodles to the dogged debates in the library over Starbucks on the merits of feminist ideology and the next paper due. All of the key players are present here: the “butch” ultra-feminist, the foreigner, the erudite professor whom all the smart girls look up to and yearn to be like, the frat boys, the rich kids, the students holding down part-time jobs and the free-spirited girls who make kissy-faces at taxi drivers then call them assholes and walk away; they’re all here. If you lived this undergraduate experience, you’ll feel at home here, wrapped in a Snuggie of, yeah, “nostalgia.” You’ll understand the references and won’t be shocked at how often the words “smoke” or “condom” or “rights” come up.

  The above quote is a fantastic summation of this novel in all the best ways. The Red Word is about a year in the lives of a group of undergraduate students, and the catastrophes they catalyzed, exacerbated and lived within their “superoxygenated atmosphere of attention and information and privilege and power.” At the center of this story is Karen, a Canadian student on an American Ivy League campus her sophomore year. When Karen moves into “Raghurst,” a student house where a group of lesbian radical feminists live, and simultaneously starts dating a frat boy from GBC (better known as “Gang Bang Central” on campus), it is the spark that ignites the subsequent events; she is straddling a dangerous line between two houses who go to war over women’s rights versus patriarchal “brotherhood” – a war of the greater society as a whole. It’s about their year of learning, of trauma, of sexual exploration and viewing the world around them through their stanch lens of feminism.

  “Frat boys like to share. You have to watch your back.”

  Far beyond just being an ode to campus life, The Red Wordexplores the crevices of rape culture on college campuses and in society as a whole. It reaches into the nooks and crannies of words like “consent” and “consensual” and shows it all to us through the eyes of a group of young women so far from home, so close and yet so far from finding themselves. Sarah Henstra’s debut is intelligently done, intellectual, and very often witty. It is biting and often cringe-worthy, both theoretically and physically. But keep watching; keep reading. Never look away from this mirror. This novel puts the reader right in the midst of the Crog-wearing, Iliad-quoting erudites of a women-centric viewpoint, right in the middle of the bloom of self-awareness. (They’d hate me for saying that, wouldn’t they?)

  It did tend toward the melodrama in areas, but doesn’t the college experience itself? Toward the end I was thinking, If I see one more melodramatic, theatrical proclamation, I’ll scream. (Oh Dyann, how you would splinter the spears and batter the bright shields! Stay, oh stay with me.) And yet, the subject matter here was so worthy of exploration. Frat culture and pack mentalities. The ethics of “victim blaming” –

  *spoken in an existential cadence

  If a girl goes into a frat party and gets herself drunk, does she deserve to be gang raped? * The politics of single parenthood for the woman – is she weak for “succumbing” to her circumstances, being “trampled by patriarchy,” for letting her parents pull her out of school, for embarking on single-parenthood of an unwanted baby? Or, is there another worthy argument at play here as well? You be the judge.

  The Red Word was a fantastic debut novel from Henstra, which I would highly recommend to anyone, particularly college-aged females. If there was ever a novel to sit around and discuss ad nauseam, it’s this one. It raised brave questions and turned the typical “college trajectory into adulthood” story on its head. There was nothing predictable about this novel. And I thought that was for the best – because, is there ever really anything predictable about college or our life experiences after it? I think not. Henstra and The Red Word earned a strong 4 stars from the start and held them throughout. ****

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