Editorial Content for A Tiny Upward Shove
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Reviewer (text)
At times, Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel, A TINY UPWARD SHOVE, is almost painfully difficult to read. It’s not because the language is obscure or complex, and it’s not because the imagery is confusing or the sentence structure too dense. Rather, at certain points, the sheer weight of the violence, disappointment and heartbreak that Chadburn writes about becomes nearly too much to bear, especially once readers realize that much of what she chronicles is based on real-life tragedies.
"[A]s the relationship between Marina and Alex demonstrates most poignantly, [this book is] also a celebration of the ways in which love and loyalty can persist and grow despite the desolation and violence that surrounds it."
The central figure of this richly textured novel is Marina Salles, a young Filipino American girl who is raised by her grandmother and her occasionally loving, too often neglectful mother. Readers know almost from the opening pages that Marina has been murdered, the latest victim of a serial sexual predator and killer who preys on sex workers and drug-addicted women. But what Marina’s murderer doesn’t count on is that her body is occupied by an aswang, a Filipino spirit that is transmitted from generation to generation when people die and leave behind unfinished business.
How Marina got to this desperate, tragic place, and what business she left unfinished, forms the crux of the rest of the book. Chadburn intersperses scenes from Marina’s family (including those of her ancestors), her childhood and eventually her young adulthood with vignettes of her killer’s thought processes and insights into his background. What’s striking is some of the similarities in their life stories. One becomes a tragic victim while the other is twisted into a monstrous predator, but both are shaped in large part by economic insecurity and deprivation.
Chadburn also recounts the stories of other secondary characters, most notably that of Alex, a young woman whom Marina befriends at a foster care facility when she’s taken into child and protective services custody following a disturbing failure of her mother to protect her from sexual violence. Alex’s story, brief as it is, is perhaps even more troubling than Marina’s own. But the loyalty and passion that arise from their relationship may be the thing that inspires the aswang to inhabit Marina’s body and save countless other young women from sharing her fate.
A TINY UPWARD SHOVE may sound unrelentingly bleak, with its graphic and upsetting descriptions of rape, child abuse and blatant abuses of power wielded primarily by men against women and girls who are marginalized by virtue of their gender, race and/or immigration status. But, as the relationship between Marina and Alex demonstrates most poignantly, it’s also a celebration of the ways in which love and loyalty can persist and grow despite the desolation and violence that surrounds it.
Teaser
Marina Salles’ life does not end the day she wakes up dead. Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother’s old Filipino stories --- an aswang, a creature of mystery and vengeance. She spent her time on earth on the margins. Shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, she was a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance, understanding very little of her own life, let alone the lives of others. Death brings her into the hearts and minds of those she has known --- even her killer --- as she accesses their memories and sees anew the meaning of her own.
Promo
Marina Salles’ life does not end the day she wakes up dead. Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother’s old Filipino stories --- an aswang, a creature of mystery and vengeance. She spent her time on earth on the margins. Shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, she was a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance, understanding very little of her own life, let alone the lives of others. Death brings her into the hearts and minds of those she has known --- even her killer --- as she accesses their memories and sees anew the meaning of her own.
About the Book
A TINY UPWARD SHOVE is inspired by Melissa Chadburn's Filipino heritage and its folklore, as it traces the too-short life of a young, cast-off woman transformed by death into an agent of justice --- or mercy.
Marina Salles’ life does not end the day she wakes up dead.
Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother’s old Filipino stories --- an aswang, a creature of mystery and vengeance. She spent her time on earth on the margins; shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, she was a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance, understanding very little of her own life, let alone the lives of others. Death brings her into the hearts and minds of those she has known --- even her killer --- as she accesses their memories and sees anew the meaning of her own. In her nine days as an aswang, while she considers whether to exact vengeance on her killer, she also traces back, finally able to see what led these two lost souls to a crushingly inevitable conclusion.
In A TINY UPWARD SHOVE, the debut novelist Melissa Chadburn charts the heartbreaking journeys of two of society’s castoffs as they make their way to each other and their roles as criminal and victim. What does it mean to be on the brink? When are those moments that change not only our lives but our very selves? And how, in this impossible world, full of cruelty and negligence, can we rouse ourselves toward mercy?
Audiobook available, read by Kelsey Navarro
