A powerful and memorable set of tales that fuse fantasy and reality into women’s struggles.
Bobe’s collection of sometimes-fantastical short stories features women in situations that highlight the perils and the beauty of existence.
In a Ray Bradbury–inspired framing story, “The Illustrated Woman: Part One,” a young woman visits a carnival with some friends, eventually wandering into the tent of a woman covered head-to-toe in tattoos. As the visitor gazes at different images, she sees different stories: “And they moved, and changed, and showed me. And I found that I could see.” Each of the tales features a female protagonist, and they collectively cover a wide range of themes. In the story “Through Water, Through Glass,” the unhappily engaged Rori yearns for a position at the elite Ocean Study Center in an unspecified city; during a tour of the place, she sees a narwhal. When she later briefly visits her unnamed hometown in the Arctic, the unusual sight of a different narwhal coincides with a near-death experience. In the tale “These Dark Deeds,” Eliza reminisces about the summer she was 13,when she and her younger brother, Josh, went to live with their older brother, Tim, after their parents’ deaths. After Josh goes missing, Eliza uncovers a secret cult that’s been operating in the town for generations. In perhaps the eeriest story, “Indelible,” a young nanny watches her two charges on an “art train” featuring traveling exhibits, but is continually haunted by memories of her sister’s suicide and a “hellish garden of tormented bodies and women who no longer were.”
Some stories rely more heavily than others on fantasy or supernatural elements, such as the demon Moloch in “Come the End, She will Be Light.” Although the tales offer a mix of happy and horrifying conclusions, many are simply open-ended. Bobe breathes life into each one of these miniature works, and each imaginary world she builds is distinctive, whether it’s a college campus or a parallel dimension full of beasts. The frame story is short and sweet, allowing the focus to remain on the winding journeys of the intriguing women in other works. Recurring themes of abuse, resilience, trauma, and choice effectively permeate the narratives; on occasion, though, the symbolism and messaging can be a tad heavy-handed (Rori internally muses that her engagement ring is “so damned heavy” while planning a wedding to a man she doesn’t love, for instance). One tale, “A Taste of Memory,” stands out as much shorter and more esoteric than the others, with an intense focus on the memories and feelings that various tastes and textures can evoke, and some readers may find its experiment to be unsuccessful. By and large, however, Bobe creates consistently absorbing fictional worlds, using smooth prose and dialogue that effectively transport audiences into each expertly crafted milieu. Genuinely funny moments—as when a character describes an influx of demons in a small town as “cosmic menstruation”—appear unexpectedly, as do heartbreaking ones. The author also conjures real moments of fear, which sometimes have a ghostly cast.
A powerful and memorable set of tales that fuse fantasy and reality into women’s struggles.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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