The Ladies

The Ladies reads like a fever dream you wake from hungrily and fall to feasting–fall to dreaming again, hoping to return to the birds and the buckets, to rain and stones and confusions of being, to the marvelously muddied frontier between the living and the dead. Sara Veglahn gives us a lush, thingy, ethereal world all her very own.

From the chrysalis-tomb comes this chorus, these ladies, with voices of green fire and river ice. They speak to us, the living, the as-yet-unwept, of the death world behind the glass and beneath the waves, at the end of night, and they lull, and they terrify. Sara Veglahn’s writing gives the crocus a tongue of flame. The Ladies, her latest novel, is a distillate of our dreams and nightmares, a bright offering. To read is to break the surface, to begin the sinking, to find in any moment a great distance opening like a hole in the known.