Given Anne Michaels is also a poet, it is unsurprising to find there is something lyrical and musical about her prose. “Held” is filled with splendidly musical writing. Indeed, many of her phrases and sentences would not be out of place in a poem.
This characteristic is undoubtedly one of the reasons I found “Held” an enjoyable read.
However, the strong linear narrative – the story is essentially a kind of family saga – has been broken up and reordered, so that you jump about on the family’s timeline. Indeed, in the early part of the book, there seems to be temporal jumping around within a single ‘chapter’. I have to say that (from a reader’s perspective) I’m not really sure what this adds to the book. Perhaps more than anything it detracts; more than once I found myself trying to reorientate to reestablish who the characters were and how they were related to each other.
Ian Gouge - Writer 