Satirical Women’s Fiction
A satirical women’s fiction book, As Joan Approaches Infinity, is a dark satire about finding meaning. At the Colorado Springs Spring Book Bash event in April I met a local author, Kika Dorsey, author of the satirical women’s fiction, As Joan Approaches Infinity. Probably based on my titles, Kika told me I probably wouldn’t like her book that it was a dark comedy about a middle-aged woman. Still, she generously gifted me a signed copy.
It only took me three hours to read this funny, quirky, satire about Joan, a woman whose passions land her in some not so fun places.
More about As Joan Approaches Infinity from the back cover…
As Joan Approaches Infinity is a dark comedy about a middle-aged woman and pivotal moments that spiral from the main character’s ecstasy and despair. She is married to her college sweetheart and has two children. A mother, adjunct instructor, and woman with a mission, Joan approaches her life with childlike determination to change her world and her community. While her growth spirals, she ends up in the same place again and again in the tumultuous waves of her existence. Spiral in form, the novel and Joan grow through repetition and the longing toward something new and the certainty of her love. This is a raucous ride through the mind of a flawed but lovable character and a testament to the challenges of women in a late-stage-capitalist America.
186 pages, Paperback, Goodreads
My official review of this satirical women’s fiction
4.5/5 stars
I was warned by this author that I may not like this book. First, she needs to stop telling people that. And second, I found it a great read. It’s described as a dark comedy. When someone says dark to me, my mind leaps to subjects like murder, violence, abuse, hauntings, the things of horror stories. This book is not that.
Trapped in a rut of suburban motherhood, the middle-aged part-time career woman, Joan, longs for something else, the one thing that will make her life feel whole, fulfilled, and perhaps above all not mundane and meaningless. From the outside it may look like she has everything, a nice home, loving husband, two kids, a boy and girl, but her psyche is haunted by her wanting.
Written in a third person POV, the writing style took me a minute to adjust to. However, within pages I was right there with the narrator looking in on Joan’s life and her topsy turvy emotions and antics wondering where this story would lead me. The third person point of view gave me the feeling that I was seeing something I shouldn’t be, peeking into Joan’s feelings and private life, things she would probably want to hide. But this POV choice and the stark, initially seemingly blunt writing style accented Joan’s desperation for finding meaning.
In the vain of Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, As Joan Approaches Infinity takes a satirical look at how someone can look so whole on the outside but feel so broken on the inside, and the sometimes self-destructive and seemingly crazy things they do to try to fill the hole.
About the Author
Kika Dorsey is an author and a Lecturer at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She teaches university literature and creative writing classes. While finishing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in Seattle, Washington, she performed her poetry with musicians and artists and wrote about German and Italian modern and postmodern writers. In recent years she has also begun to write and publish fiction and ghostwrite fiction and nonfiction books and articles.
Her poems have been published in The Denver Quarterly, KYSO Flash, The Comstock Review, Narrative Northeast, The Columbia Review, among numerous other journals and books. She is the author of four poetry collections, Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010), Rust, Coming Up For Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), winner of the Colorado Authors’ League Award. She is an affiliate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and at Front Range Community College and has tutored in their writing center since 2008. In addition, she is a contributing editor of MacQueen’s Quinterly and the advising poetry editor of Plains Paradox.
When not writing, tutoring, or teaching, she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.
Find all of Kika’s works on her website here.
Happy reading!
Tricia/Maria Jane
Tricia Copeland believes in finding magic. She thinks magic infuses every aspect of our lives, whether it is the magic of falling in love, discovering a new passion, a beautiful sunset, or a book that transports us to another world. An avid runner and Georgia native, Tricia now lives with her family and four-legged friends in Colorado. Her most recent series, the Realm Chronicles, finds a fae princess fighting for her kingdom, people, and very own life, and includes lots of fantastical being including kobold, goblins, ogres, dragons, witches, vampires, vampire-witch hybrids and coming in the soon to be released book four, elves and werewolves. Find all her titles from contemporary romance and fantasy, to dystopian fiction at www.triciacopeland.com.