The Petals of Your Eyes (Starcherone/Dzanc 2014) is a surrealist novel about kidnapped girls trapped in a secret theater. Along with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, Dennis Cooper's The Marbled Swarm, and Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, it was cited in an A.V. Club Reading List by Brian Evenson entitled "6 Novels that Justify Making you Sick to Your Stomach."
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By Barbara Hoffert on June 3, 2014
Parkison, Aimee. The Petals of Your Eyes. Starcherone: Dzanc. 2014. 120p. ISBN 9781938603204. pap. $14. F
Parkison won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2004, and one can see why. Her new novel opens, “Captured girls in cabinets with curiosities. One is my sister, and the other my lover.” The concept is boldly creepy, the language eerily elegant, and the result not surreal entertainment but a pointed look at how the helpless, particularly women, are used and abused.
VERDICT Highly recommended for readers on the edge.
-- Library Journal
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“[Parkison] unfolds a fairy tale so harrowing it reads like a screen memory—so harrowing it must be true.”
-- Joyelle McSweeney, The Brooklyn Rail-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Petals of Your Eyes is a story of innocence and the repercussions of maintaining such a quality. It is a story of flowers wilting, of young girls hiding behind a mask of petals, behind their fears and naivety to please watching masters, acting out a show contained in glass. Parkison poetically and fiercely advocates for the plight of young women kidnapped and forced to grow up before their proper adulthood." http://canisiusgriffin.com/lifestyle/the-petals-of-your-eyes-review
-- The Griffin
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Shelf Awareness Review http://factandfictionbooks.shelf-awareness.com/?issue=230
In a lovely mansion tucked in the shadows of an unnamed jungle, there is a secret theater where kidnapped children are kept in cabinets and sold to "theatergoers" as part of an obscure sex trade. Aimee Parkison's debut novel, The Petals of Your Eyes, is narrated by one of these children--a girl stolen from her family and stripped of her name like all the other enslaved children. To save themselves, the captives rename each other after flowers: the Gardenia, the Rose (our narrator). It is a thin demonstration of hope that veils nightmarish realities of a deeply perverse and violent world.
The theater, as seen through the eyes of the young narrator, is full of suspense and constant motion. Everything seems to be shivering, roiling, convulsing, as though in a state of ecstasy, pain, or both: "Outside the theater, the head stagehand's knives mimic the flight of sparrows by twilight, men's coins thrown down at the tree where we children dance through flame to wave singed feathers, carving names through air."
Often, The Petals of Your Eyes reads less like a traditional story than a montage of macabre and gorgeous images, dripping with beauty and pulsing with fear. Exotic birds fly among leather-masked falcons that attack the faces of powerless actors. The bones of infants are dug up and strung into puppets to amuse the children. In such a world, beauty only sharpens terror, luring the reader in before revealing the horrors of sadism, lust and the insatiable thirst for power. --Annie AthertonDiscover: A darkly beautiful, surreal novel about children trapped in an obscure sex trade.