This is a vital, riveting anthology that emphasizes the complexity and diversity of minority experience.
Short fiction from a diverse array of writers of color.
Gathering both emerging and established voices, editor Baker has produced a vital anthology whose strength lies in its unwillingness to commit to a single genre or style. Some of the stories, like Courttia Newland's creepy science-fiction adventure "Link," are explicitly political. Newland tells the story of Aaron, a black British college student who possesses mysterious psychic abilities. On the eve of the 2016 Brexit referendum, he encounters other young people of color with similar abilities; soon, they face the temptation of using their powers to punish those who would exclude them. Other stories, like Glendaliz Camacho's haunting "Long Enough to Drown," are less explicitly political. Camacho concerns herself with the particular textures of an Afro-Latinx woman's romantic longing for her dead boyfriend's brother. Brandon's race—he is a white Irish man, "quite the trophy to bring home," as the narrator says—raises important questions about what drives desire. Alexander Chee's "Mine" follows a young gay son of Korean immigrants. Perhaps the most surprising entry comes from Brandon Taylor: His lyrical "Boy/Gamin" follows a young white boy from childhood to adolescence. Written in the urgency of the present tense, the story tracks Jackson's struggle to accommodate his budding desire for other boys. One of those love interests is a young black boy named Eric, about whom Jackson has vivid fantasies. While floating off the Montgomery, Alabama, shore, "he imagines he can feel Eric's fingers on his stomach...he sees Eric's face, long and angular like a dog's, black skin everywhere, green eyes staring over thick lashes. He's beautiful and skinny and Jackson wants to punch him in the nose to make him ugly." This sentence displays the audacious complexity of Taylor's prose as he straddles the confusion of adolescent desire, emerging queerness, and racial difference. Not every story works: Jason Reynolds' "African-American Special" relies too heavily on voice, while Yiyun Li's "A Sheltered Woman" suffers for not having enough space to unfold the mysteries that accumulate around Chinese immigrant Auntie Mei.
This is a vital, riveting anthology that emphasizes the complexity and diversity of minority experience.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3494-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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