Beautifully written, wildly imaginative stories.
Magical realism and realism that’s not quite realistic mingle in this debut collection of 13 stories.
Death reorders the lives of those left behind; that’s the idea at the heart of many of the stories in Collins’ collection. In “Sunday,” Paul, who feels responsible for his son’s death, punishes himself first by losing both arms in an “accident” and then by marrying a woman with a “marathon mouth” whose incessant talking distracts him from having to remember his past. In “Drawers,” one of the collection’s standouts, Lawrence is driving to his grandson’s circumcision ceremony when he slams into a horse. Undone by his wife’s recent death, which brings back memories of his mother’s death and how his father coped, Lawrence begins to reckon with how little he has allowed himself to live. Many of these stories tilt toward magical realism. That’s the case in “Big Bad,” a feminist revision of “Little Red Riding Hood” in which a woman gives birth to older and older versions of herself, each a little more liberated than the last. Elsewhere, magical plots (one about a woman who keeps finding hearts) come at the expense of character development, and stories like “Stone Fruit” and “Lonelyhearts” feel quite slight. But when Collins flirts with magic, rather than fully embraces it, she captures the myriad ways the real world is mysterious—filled with both wonder and terror. In “The Horse Lamp,” another gem, a satellite repairman named Jarrod is seduced by a customer who wants him to help her get pregnant. As she gradually reveals her real reasons for wanting a baby, Jarrod absorbs her trauma, and the story becomes a cautionary tale about the power of storytelling and our very human desire to believe what we hear.
Beautifully written, wildly imaginative stories.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-946448-72-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica.
Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication—what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie and The Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island—loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site—is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs “to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she’s come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic’s kids, especially 9-year-old Orly—who never knew his mother—become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light—along with buried bodies—mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters’ internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity.
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250827951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.
Another beguilingly enigmatic tale from Murakami, complete with jazz, coffee, Borgesian twists, the Beatles, and other trademark motifs.
In what is in many ways a bookend to 1Q84, Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror (think Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Pulse), and coming-of-age story. His protagonist and narrator, as the novel opens, is a 17-year-old boy aswoon in love with a 16-year-old girl. “At that time neither you nor I had names,” he sighs, and when the girl slips away, he knows too little about her to find her. Before that, though, she transports him to a walled city that’s not on any map: “Not everyone can enter. You need special qualifications to do that.” Both of them have those qualifications, the young man filling the urgently needed role of a reader of dusty and long-backlogged dreams. The girl moves on, the boy becomes a middle-aged man, and back in the real world where “silence and nothingness, as always, were my constant companions,” he abandons Tokyo for a little mountain town to become its librarian, curating real books, not dreams. There he encounters two otherworldly characters, one a neurodivergent teen, Yellow Submarine Boy, who memorizes every book he reads, whatever the subject. The other—well, as he explains, “without hesitation, I’d say that although it’s rather dated and convenient, you could call me a ghost.” Both characters point in their own ways to a fleeting world where all that matters, in the end, is love—and where love is always just out of reach. It’s an elegant fable that deftly weaves ordinary reality—“something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives”—with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful.
Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801970
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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