ONE SMALL SAGA by Bobbie Louise Hawkins

(Ugly Duckling Press 2019)

With brilliant poetic leaps, Bobbie Louise Hawkins tells the semi-autobiographical story of a nineteen-year-old girl who is whisked away from her working-class life in West Texas by a well-to-do Danish architect to live in London and then in Belise. The narrator is 19, sharp, witty, an artist and so cool that she can play down her own heartbreak. “Sometimes I feel I live in this world like a tenant.”  Instead of romanticizing the story, Hawkins’ narrator sizes up those around her (including herself), with an understated poetic style and an eye especially sensitive to hypocrisy. One can’t help falling in love with One Small Saga. It‘sa beautiful book.