With precise storytelling, Martin chronicles the unrest in his characters’ lives and the shocking moments when tensions...
Quiet traumas and long-festering emotional wounds abound in this collection.
Elucidating the tensions that can arise over a long period of intimacy, or that can emerge from an unspoken sense of resentment, can be a difficult thing to pull off in fiction. At their best, the stories in Martin’s (Late One Night, 2016, etc.) collection offer an impressive demonstration of just how to convey these trying emotional states. Martin’s stories frequently encompass decades’ worth of events in the lives of their characters. Ancil and Lucy, the couple at the center of “The Last Civilized House,” have been together for 55 years as the story opens. When Lucy reconnects with an old flame, there’s a weight to the accumulation of events and a power that keeps the narrative unpredictable as secrets and resentments slowly come to the foreground. There’s plenty of tension in these tightly wound connections between characters. The protagonist of “Bad Family,” Lily Chang, recalls coming-of-age in China in the time of Chairman Mao. Since then, years have passed; she’s now living in Nebraska, maintaining an unlikely bond with her ex-husband and his new wife. Her decision to begin sending anonymous, threatening letters to the couple complicates matters—but it also feels somewhat arbitrary, an unexpectedly violent act whose motives and consequences require more space to fully explore. But the best of these stories also showcase an impressive restraint: The narrator of the title story gives a detailed account of his bonds with each of his estranged parents, but passing allusions to certain events—one character’s time in prison, for example—create an even grander sense of interconnection. Sudden moments of violence outnumber epiphanies in these stories, and the effect creates a quiet melancholy.
With precise storytelling, Martin chronicles the unrest in his characters’ lives and the shocking moments when tensions reach their breaking points.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945814-49-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations,...
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014).
The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi’s architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend’s two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton’s friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton’s co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche’s fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov Checks…In?," Dayang stars as ingénue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women’s societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood,” and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant.
For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi’s stories are often cheerfully sentimental.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-463-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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