Delightfully quirky vignettes that offer lighthearted approaches to everyday problems.
A set of brief dispatches lampooning some of life’s foibles.
The 21 short sketches in Davis’ idiosyncratic assemblage present a comedy of errors, often arising from simple, everyday occurrences. The scenarios portray the confusion and misdirection that occur when bickering spouses pack the car for a family camping trip or 21 steps to teeth whitening that involve bleach and airplane glue, among other situations. Readers who field endless emails and messages at a home office will appreciate the devilish candor of “Working From Home”—a piece in which juggling work and family obligations tends to resemble a frenzied circus. The hilarious title story is also the book’s lengthiest; it showcases a whimsical, playful conversation between a rather oblivious, if omnipresent, tea-slurping God and an obedient angel named Bates who, in pages of banter, works hard to make his boss look good. The book’s ability to laugh at life’s woes is its best quality; a section on “The Ten Most Common Medical Complaints of the Middle-Aged Woman,” for instance, offers a chuckle about the aging process. Davis effortlessly sends up the serious business of demonic possession in “Exorcisms ‘R’ Us” and a convoluted itinerary for a “Six-Day Guided Tour of Rome” with a wink and a smirk. One of the pieces here wouldn’t be surprising as a startup idea: a timeshare program that rents out house cats of varying personalities and temperaments by the week or the month. Overall, the material is of consistently high quality, ranging from silly and fanciful to laugh-out-loud hilarious, and may appeal to readers young and old. Ireland’s cute, black-and-white line drawings sprinkled throughout depict scenes from the stories and embellish this breezy work.
Delightfully quirky vignettes that offer lighthearted approaches to everyday problems.Pub Date: June 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-914603-7
Page Count: 102
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully thorough, well-balanced collection.
In Bilal’s debut, Black American Muslims explore the intricacies of their faith and community.
Taqwa is tasked with writing her father’s eulogy—never an easy assignment, but made more difficult in Taqwa’s case first by the fact that her father’s ghost keeps appearing; second, an alternative narrative to her father’s life has emerged; and finally, her father’s commitment to Islam—he was an imam—may have wavered at the end of his life. The night before the interment, Taqwa sits up late, but in the morning, the eulogy—alas—has not written itself. This story, “Due North,” is one of many meticulously probing stories in Bilal’s debut collection. Each story describes the experiences of Black Muslims with varying levels of commitment to their faith, including at least one nonbeliever. It’s a rare glimpse into a community that has received almost no literary attention, and Bilal is a skillful guide—sympathetic, nuanced, searching, but not uncritical. She describes one character as having “the look of someone who would always be limited by her own cunning, no hope of ever growing wise.” In “Candy for Hanif,” Sister Norah cares for her cognitively delayed son long after her husband has died. “In that moment,” Bilal writes, “the entire city looked to her like a cage, placing limits on what she could know of the world.” Bilal seems to particularly excel in the longer pieces, when she has room to explore. Still, despite the many, many attributes that make up this fine collection, there is a sameness to the structure and style of narration in many of the stories, especially those that are voiced in first person. The narrators tend to resemble each other. That’s something for Bilal to watch out for in later books—clearly, there will be many more.
A beautifully thorough, well-balanced collection.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781982191818
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
Science fiction author (The Wall of Storms, 2016) and translator (The Redemption of Time, Baoshu, 2019) Liu’s short stories explore the nature of identity, consciousness, and autonomy in hostile and chaotic worlds.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia (“Ghost Days”). A poor salvager on a distant planet learns to channel a revolutionary spirit through her alter ego of a rabbit (“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard”). In “Byzantine Empathy,” a passionate hacktivist attempts to upend charitable giving through blockchain and VR technology even as her college roommate, an executive at a major nonprofit, fights to co-opt the process, a struggle which asks the question of whether pure empathy is possible—or even desired—in our complex geopolitical structure. Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity, in which human minds are scanned and uploaded to servers, establishing an immortal existence in virtuality, a concept which many previous SF authors have already explored exhaustively. (Liu also never explains how an Earth that is rapidly becoming depleted of vital resources somehow manages to indefinitely power servers capable of supporting 300 billion digital lives.) However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance in its depiction of a father who stubbornly clings to a flesh-and-blood existence for himself and his loved ones in the rotting remains of human society years after most people have uploaded themselves (“Staying Behind”). There is also some charm in the title tale, a fantasy stand-alone concerning a young woman snatched from her home and trained as a supernaturally powered assassin who retains a stubborn desire to seek her own path in life.
A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-03-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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