Jeremy Luke Hill's review of Lemons in Event 41/7
Video interview with fellow writer RB Young in his new podcast series WriteIdeas.
Review of Lemons by Adam Meisner in The Humber Literary Review
So while the young Basia wishes her life to be something like that of Anne Shirley, it usually veers toward the dark, heartbreaking realities more often found in the stories of Munro. Basia struggles to find a best friend, she is molested by her grandfather, and grows up to be a woman who suffers from myasthenia gravis: “the body attacking itself, signals not getting from nerves to muscle.” Life is not easy, the book tells its readers—though not without folding the briefest humour into its harrowing tales.
It’s not entirely fair, however, to think of this book simply in relation to what’s come before. Jaronczyk’s stories are stylistically distinct and innovative. This comes out strongly in “The Rug,” in which a young Polish woman, Ala, receives a tense visit from her Canadian-émigré mother-in-law, Magda (Basia’s mother). This story shifts masterfully between Magda and Ala’s narration for a complex, dual portrait. And in “Epidemic (Director’s Cut),” Jaronczyk details a series of scenes in sequence and then deepens the reader’s understanding of those scenes by offering a series of deleted scenes. Jaronczyk shines in being able to simultaneously respect and tease the boundaries of the conventional short story.
Interview with Malgorzata P. Bonikowska in Gazeta
Lemons review in Canadian Jewish News
Kasia Jaronczyk’s collection of stories, titled Lemons, is a contemporary addition to the tradition of Canadian writing that straddles European and North American experience. She begins with a careful portrayal of young girls’ lives in communist Poland. Jaronczyk often leaves the details about specific places and times ambiguous, but the reader gets a sense of a decaying empire, an end time, when people’s lives are unpredictable at best: children play at the edge of unfinished housing projects; fathers disappear on prolonged work trips; families break up as the adventurous ones make their way west toward the relative unknown.
In Lemons, the lives left behind in Poland are raw and on edge. It’s the old world that presses its images on the reader. The Palace of Culture and Science, a Soviet-style skyscraper built on the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, haunts the collection’s concluding story. Like the city itself, it sends an ambiguous message, at once appealing and troubling, to one of Jaronczyk’s characters. The building filling the skyline looks almost “beautiful, with its edges dissolving like a watercolour into the misty rain, the awnings of the market stalls around it like colourful stacks of banknotes.”
20 Questions with poet and writer Rob McLennan
Interview with the Bristol Short Story Prize
Review in Minerva Reader by Lisa de Nilolits: www.theminervareader.com/featured-book
"Reading this collection of short stories is like watching a black and white art film – you’re unlikely to forget the characters, imagery or events – and you won’t want to forget them either.
The cool, calm, objective and dispassionate narration of truly terrible events makes for a startling read – in fact, I found myself going back and rereading more than a few of the pages – had what I thought happened, really happened? And yes, it had. Such sharp writing and such insights into childhood abuse, torments and humiliations, and the tired resignation of adult acceptance.
It was interesting too, to read linked stories, I really enjoyed that.
Lemons is a tart, satisfying, thought-provoking read."