Arms

We are mesmerized, enthralled. A young, armless girl, tangled in the brutal arrowhead wire of glistening ivy, stares with dead eyes. If I had arms, I would embrace my shaking body. I would lift my hands to my face, cover my eyes, hold the aching scream in my mouth.Combining Wiccan ritual magic, Gnosticism, alchemy and of course Madeline Sonik’s dazzling writing and storytelling, this magic-realist novella relates the story of a young woman who loses her arms in a freak home-accident and embarks on a quest for them in an absurdly complex and callous world. Sonik’s gripping prose leads us through new but eerily familiar surroundings as the heroine follows an extraordinary path of enchantment, marriage, agony, ridicule, ritual and self-realization.Arms is both a work of fiction and a magical text of healing, and as such is the first work of its kind to be published in North America. It was written, originally, as a black cord dissertation for the 13th House Mystery School and as a transformational incantation to assist those who read it in the recovery and rebirth of the creative imagination. Arms is a rare story with a powerful fairy-tale, classical element that will prevent it from escaping the reader’s mind and will coax re-reading for even the squeamish and the skeptical.

AUTHOR

Madeline Sonik

Madeline Sonik is an eclectic, award-winning writer and anthologist whose fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in literary journals internationally. Her published book-length works include a novel, Arms; a collection of short fiction,; Drying the Bones; a children’s novel Belinda and the Dustbunnys; a poetry collection, Stone Sightings; and a collection of personal essays, Afflictions & Departures. She is also the co-editor of three anthologies: Fresh Blood: New Canadian Gothic Fiction; Entering the Landscape; and When I Was a Child: Stories for Grownups and Children.

Reviews

Arms is a strange, surreal, magical story about a girl whose arms are amputated by flying shingles when her home actually explodes because of the emotional volatility of her parents … extremely memorable.–W.P. Kinsella, Books in Canada
Arms, is a verbal heartache, a bravura performance of language and performance of language and perverse imagination … The power of the book is unstoppable, largely because of the amazing imagery and manipulation of language … The metaphorical quality of the novel dances between the magical and the realistic in an exquisite pairing … Sonik’s voice is unusual and absolutely compelling … what a journey!–Candace Fertile, Globe and Mail
Praise for Sonik’s previous work:

Wow. Madeline Sonik’s first collection of stories is an amazing debut. Twenty-five luminous, dense, provocative and heart-wrenching stories take readers all over the map of human emotion. Love, hate, sex, racism, madness are placed on the pages with exquisite precision, lifting the ordinary into the realm of myth, and making the story itself an icon of life A short review cannot possibly do justice to this book. It has far too much excellent content and stunning writing … just go get it and read it.
–Candace Fertile, The Times Colonist (Victoria)

It is Sonik’s firm grounding of stories in a single image that distinguishes her from most other fiction writers … Sonik’s stories assume a refreshing variety of tones … I would highly recommend this book to readers of fiction.
–John Fell, The Antigonish Review
– Praise for Sonik’s previous work