Review: 'A Tiny Upward Shove,' by Melissa Chadburn

Melissa Chadburn's bold, sharp, fast-paced novel "A Tiny Upward Shove" opens with the violent death of Marina Salles and the spirit, known as aswang, that picks up where Marina left off; the aswang "is … activated within a lineage when someone has died with unfinished business."

The unfinished business, in Marina's case, includes most of her life — she is 18 when she is murdered on a pig farm in Vancouver — and, more specifically, a search for Sabina, her best friend Alex's long-lost adoptive mother.

The prose plunges fearlessly, restlessly, often violent, sometimes playful — Marina's grandmother's house is referred to as the "Plastic Palace" — into the stories of Marina, her mother (known as Mutya and Ma) and her grandmother (known as Lola). Chadburn's settings span from the Philippines in 1742 to the second half of the 20th century in California, from Lola's multigenerational house in Seaside to the group home, called the Pines, where Marina is eventually sent.

"We are never ashamed of our agonies," Chadburn writes. "In fact, we broadcast them — each conversation a carnival of agonies."

The seemingly endless list of agonies ranges from Lola's marriage — "You'd never guess that [her husband would] sometimes throw Lola smack into the fridge, her face hitting the door handle. Or that she, every morning, dropped a pinch of ground-up ant chalk in his coffee" — to the nightmarish violence Marina endures.

Though Marina's murder is at the center of the work, other victims of the same man also appear on the page. The gruesome cruelty of these stories is relentless, but the subtler moments work well: Marina's mother dreams of "[a] house with a garden" and a tree with "lemons the size of pig hearts"; meanwhile, Marina's life ends on a pig farm.

Of the many relationships Marina develops in her 18 years, it is the one with her mother that is the most complicated and compelling, the one that frustrates and delights. Chadburn describes it well: Marina is "longing for and despising and being eternally coupled with Ma."

The simultaneity of antagonism and love are rendered beautifully and painfully between the two. "The contradiction of Mutya, her obsession, her doting, yet the fact of her absence" — these are the things that haunt Marina above all, a haunting that is echoed in Alex's search for Sabina, by way of the aswang.

At the Pines, Chadburn writes, "the girls carried their resentments forever. They burned and burned with no end in sight." This ferocious and frightening novel documents the burn.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared/is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-2016 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

A Tiny Upward Shove

By: Melissa Chadburn.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 342 pages, $27.