Eleven enchanted and enchanting stories of change.
Magical realism meets bildungsroman.
In this supernatural debut short story collection, the boundaries of reality are stretched to include all manner of creature and settings. In the title tale, a worm-fiddling girl named Lemon lives with her competitive uncles in the swamps and craves the attention of her best friend, an alligator wrestler named Sweets, who only has eyes for an albino beast called Swamp Ghost. In “Baba Yaga’s House of Forgotten Things,” juvenile delinquents are sent to atone in a home run by grannies, where the breeze “blows through open windows, stopping to dip its fingers in jars of rose and lavender scented talcum” and where a particularly cruel granny inflicts extra punishment by practicing “boo-hagging” in which, in the middle of the night, with her teeth out, she sits on a resident’s chest, tickling him awake with the dry strands of her silver hair. In “How to Get Rid of a Ghost & Other Lessons From Camp Pispogutt,” a heavy-drinking camp counselor finds that the only things that quiet the ghost of her best friend who trails her incessantly are sleeping with the lifeguard and diving deep into the lake. The girls who live in the sanctuary in “The Church of the Living God & Rescue Home for Divine Orphans” are each blessed/cursed with incredible attributes—one was born with a sun inside her, so her skin burns hot, and the more emotional she feels, the hotter she gets; another produces crystals from her nearly blind eyes; yet another has wings that must be clipped regularly—and they all hope to be saved by a prince from a faraway world. In just a few pages, Lojewski creates deeply imaginative and textured worlds. However mundane the plights of her characters—a crush on a boy, a tense mother-daughter relationship—those surreal environments make magic of the moments.
Eleven enchanted and enchanting stories of change.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941681-71-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Burrow Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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