Review: "Isadora" by Amelia Gray

Isadora is the last novel I would expect from a writer like Amelia Gray. For her second novel and fifth overall book, Gray has seemingly done away with her scattershot, provocative flash fiction for a period piece that (for her) is a dense and densely populated saga of grief and sadness that is anything but conventional, an attribute that fits Gray very well. Her first novel Threats, a strange tale about love lost and mysterious letters as well as her superior short story collection Gunshot charmed me deeply, but I found that they sometimes liked a big heart (especially Threats, and while this is her most emotionally impactful book by a country mile, it is a very imperfect work at that that might just be a bit too long, which is again, the last thing I thought I would be saying about an Amelia Gray novel. The Isadora of the title is Isadora Duncan, an obscure figure from history who wowed audiences in Europe with her elaborate dance routines. But in 1913, her two children along with their nanny die in a freak car accident. It is this time period that Gray is most interested in, where her grief seems to overwhelm her and Isadora’s behavior overwhelms a rather tepid cast of characters, from her lover Max, to her partner Paris and her put upon sister Elizabeth, they all seem like one dimensional characters in Isadora’s soap opera, but I suspect that might be the point. But besides that, Gray offers up some real interesting scenes, from a visit to a psychic, to a painful performance while Isadora is still overcome with grief and an ending that is far and away the best thing Gray has ever written. This is a surprising book, not just for the emotional terrain it plumbs and for its jarring humor, but that it comes from a writer who seemed so comfortable dealing in fragments.

Rating: 4/5