![]() ![]() ![]() The novel’s first sentence-“I saw my mother raise a man from the dead”-is incredibly crafty. I had that experience after finishing Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s latest novel, which is based on a true story and concerns the omnipresent pressures of working in the wake of history. The sensation also has to do with feeling like the writer made every sentence matter, which in a book of several hundred pages is like pulling off a magic trick. There’s something enlivening about finishing a book and going back to the beginning, Finnegans Wake-style, and finding the beginning told the end, and vice versa. I don’t believe in hard-and-fast rules about fiction anymore, but in examples where that maxim is true, I’ve felt rejuvenated once I was done reading them. There’s an old-school rule about the technique of fiction writing that claims the first sentence of a story should tell its whole plot. ![]()
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