A collection with a goth heart beating beneath a cheerleader’s peppy exterior.
Bite-sized fiction about the lives of women, from the far past to the present and beyond, who have been wronged.
The characters in this third collection of short fiction from Sparks (The Unfinished World and Other Stories, 2016, etc.) exemplify the famous quote from Muriel Rukeyser that made the social media rounds in the wake of the #MeToo movement: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” These are stories of that split-open world. In “Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park”—an uncharacteristically lengthy story for Sparks—a young girl living in a trailer park is haunted by the ghost of another young girl, who helps her navigate the turmoil of her hardscrabble environment. The daughter of an artist obsessed with making dioramas of female saints tells the story of her strange childhood and her stepfather’s murder at the hands of her mother (“The Eyes of Saint Lucy”). Many of Sparks’ pieces borrow from myths and fairy tales; in “A Place for Hiding Precious Things,” a young princess is transported by her fairy godmother to contemporary New York City to save her from a ghoulish fate. In “When the Husband Grew Wings,” a wife who adds a magic powder to her husband’s cereal that results in his growing wings is unhappy with the results. Although there is anger and rage in these stories, Sparks suffuses them with zingy humor at every opportunity. At their best, they balance heartbreak and wit. The pieces that don’t land are the ones where that wit grows cartoonish, such as the apocalyptic “We Destroy the Moon,” in which a cult leader’s wife persistently hashtags her own narration.
A collection with a goth heart beating beneath a cheerleader’s peppy exterior.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-620-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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