In Odessa, Gabrielle Sher introduces Yetta, a restless teenage girl coming of age in a shtetl shadowed by fear, where disappearances and whispered violence press in on daily life. After a brutal attack leaves her dead, her father turns to forbidden texts and uncertain magic to bring her back, but what returns is not entirely the daughter he lost. As Yetta begins to sense the truth of what she has become, the novel unfolds into a haunting story of grief, identity, and the consequences of trying to reverse the irreversible.
We asked Sher to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
My first love was Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll. It’s the first book I can remember reading on my own, and it felt like a secret world, my own private escape into the darkness and strangeness that I craved. I still have the copy that I read over and over, a clothbound red and ivory cover. Reading it felt like a conversation, like the book was speaking directly to me. “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
What book helped you through puberty?
I still treasure the Inkheart series by Cornelia Funke. It became my entire personality as a book-loving teenager. I wanted to live inside my books, and Inkheart made a world where that was possible. I clung to the magic of that world, and put the book under my pillow at night so I would dream about it (something I learned from Meggie) and piled my books high on every surface (something I learned from Mo). I heard our 30’s are for revisiting the things we loved as teenagers, and it just so happens that a fourth Inkheart book recently came out, nearly twenty years after the original trilogy was published. Of course I’ll be reading it.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
One of the best books I’ve read as an adult is Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men. Nothing has knocked me off my feet quite as powerfully as that book, and the first time I read it I remember thinking, “where has this been all my life?” It changed me, and I wish it had come to me sooner. I’m just glad it exists. I think it helped me make peace with the unknown. I won’t always get an answer to the questions I shout out into the void, and that’s okay.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
In high school AP English, we read two books that had a massive impact on me as a reader and a writer. They were The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I can remember the feeling of my mind opening as I read them, new neural pathways forming. I was stunned, and I remember thinking, they’re breaking all the rules and writing their own! I didn’t know books like that existed. I was particularly drawn to the idea of a fractured narrative, which Toni Morrison does so utterly brilliantly in that book. Later in my academic career during my exploration of the gothic, I read Beloved, an achingly beautiful portrayal of self-haunting (one of my favorite gothic tropes). Beloved has to be on the syllabus.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The most obvious answer is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, one of my all-time favorite books. I was also reading a lot of Shirley Jackson at the time and I love everything she ever wrote. Her books are full of strange women, and are perfect examples of the domestic gothic. The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Hangsaman, The Sun Dial… it’s really hard for me to choose a favorite, they’re all so good. When I read them I have the urge to somehow make the book a permanent part of myself. I like the way they make me think.
What books are on your nightstand now?
My nightstand has a bookshelf built into it, so there are quite a few! I like to have a lot of options near me because I’m such a mood reader. I really like a bit of everything, as long as it has something dark or strange about it. I have horror, sci-fi, fantasy, literary, historical, classics, non-fiction, gothic romance, and magical realism all on a shelf together. The last book I read was Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, a dark academia fantasy that left me with the biggest book hangover; the book I’m reading now is Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector, which captures thought patterns in such a painfully real way; the next book I want to read is Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman because I’m craving some medieval horror. I never really expect what’s going to catch my eye, and I like to stay curious about what’s out there. So many books, so little time.