S.L. Wisenberg's The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, winner of the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction, is a debut collection worth noting. Wisenberg (Holocaust Girls) does not arrange the essays chronologically, a choice that mirrors the wandering of the title and leaves readers unmoored in time, feeling the pressure of both past and present in each essay. A particularly effective use of this unmooring is apparent in "The Year of the Knee Sock," which opens in 1967, when the author is 11 and taking a fashion class at Neiman Marcus. ("NM was like us, Jewish and Texan and established.") At times self-deprecating, the essay takes readers through various sixth-grade memories before recalling a classmate whom she can't fully remember but calls "Tom." When Tom follows her into the instrument closet, Wisenberg captures the innocent confusion of immaturity: "maybe this Tom has brought instructions, a diagram that shows one how to place the musical instruments in their proper places, a map you wouldn't expect to exist, like the one that comes inside boxes of chocolate candy." The rest of the essay spirals around this moment and its aftereffects, those felt immediately and those understood only after years of reflection: "In sixth grade I didn't know my body could speak" and "no one told me I was entitled to feel triumphant."
Wisenberg's direct tone and wide-ranging curiosity make this collection one to recommend, especially to those with an interest in the ways that history and memory intertwine. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian