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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
More of a 4.5 - the short stories in the last part made me want more every time
strong beginning, lost interest, not a pleasant read.
This collection started to catch my interest in the first set of stories - Heat, made up of interwoven family histories - but it almost lost me with the dystopian middle section. I found the juxtapositions were a little bit heavy handed, then dystopian fiction can be like that. However I stuck with it because I felt a lil something. And final section - Light - was incredible. It really was. It helps you undo a lot of thinking about typical short stories. I love how unabashedly bleak parts were. I felt the country, the landscape was speaking as much as these characters were having their dilemmas and finding their way. I liked the honesty but understatedness of this section. Nothing was overblown here, whereas in the other sections it felt like sometimes there was excessive teasing out of metaphor.
A fantastic and interesting ride! This book is broken up into three parts/styles: a longer narrative about a family history, a speculative fiction involving plant people, and lots of 3-4 pages short stories that were SO impactful, it was almost overwhelming. My favourite was the speculative fiction, it was so so incredible and had so many layers. All of these stories centre different Aboriginal and Indigenous characters, and many many queer female characters/stories. It was so beautiful seeing queer love in a different culture, this book was very lovely!
I really wanted to like this collection of Speculative Fiction by queer and non-binary Aboriginal Australian writer Ellen Van Neerven, but the majority of the stories bored me, I'm sorry to say. I'm pretty sure I was not in the right mood but I just couldn't immerse myself. I appreciate the focus on Indigenous issues, the stories were well written, but somehow they didn't hook me. Sorry. :(
This is one of my all time favourite books. It is tripartite in structure with two collections of short stories separated by a speculative fiction novella. It explores identity, dispossession and colonialism, ecocriticism, and trauma with care and precise political intent.
Following is a summary of the stories because my memory is poor and I will need a refresher:
The first collection Heat follows different members of the Kresinger family as they live with the repercussions of their ancestor Pearl.
Amy is a young lesbian finding out that Pearl is her grandmother and receiving the curse of infertility from a woman Pearl cursed in her youth for facilitating her gang rape. Charlie is Amy’s father and son of the rape. Colin is Amy’s cousin who is in need of a housing grant from the Aboriginal Centre Amy works at but has stopped identifying as Aboriginal after seeing the aftermath of the gang rape of his childhood friend. This section was impactful but a bit clunky and I struggled to gauge the timeline or how the characters intersected at first instance.
The second section Water is a speculative fiction political satire where Australia is in the process of killing a race of plant people in order to relocate Indigenous people there in a misguided attempt to make reparations. It is a playful section, and the protagonist Kayden has a romantic and sexual relationship with a plant person, exploring what it means to be human and how nature is not ‘outside’s us but innate.
The final section Light is a miscellaneous group of short stories showcasing different experiences of contemporary Indigineity. Those with a male protagonist were a bit stale however the final story ‘Sound’ was astounding. It followed a woman who falls in love with her pregnant brother’s partner and her attempts to intervene as he is physically abusive.
Following is a summary of the stories because my memory is poor and I will need a refresher:
The first collection Heat follows different members of the Kresinger family as they live with the repercussions of their ancestor Pearl.
Amy is a young lesbian finding out that Pearl is her grandmother and receiving the curse of infertility from a woman Pearl cursed in her youth for facilitating her gang rape. Charlie is Amy’s father and son of the rape. Colin is Amy’s cousin who is in need of a housing grant from the Aboriginal Centre Amy works at but has stopped identifying as Aboriginal after seeing the aftermath of the gang rape of his childhood friend. This section was impactful but a bit clunky and I struggled to gauge the timeline or how the characters intersected at first instance.
The second section Water is a speculative fiction political satire where Australia is in the process of killing a race of plant people in order to relocate Indigenous people there in a misguided attempt to make reparations. It is a playful section, and the protagonist Kayden has a romantic and sexual relationship with a plant person, exploring what it means to be human and how nature is not ‘outside’s us but innate.
The final section Light is a miscellaneous group of short stories showcasing different experiences of contemporary Indigineity. Those with a male protagonist were a bit stale however the final story ‘Sound’ was astounding. It followed a woman who falls in love with her pregnant brother’s partner and her attempts to intervene as he is physically abusive.
So often the phrase 'everything is connected' is employed in ways where its meaning had been disrupted, concaved and overturned, transformed into a critique of vagueness, used by ignorance to justify itself. Van Neerven breathes powerful life back into this phrase like no other, mapping and cross-mapping flows of race, gender, family and belonging. No theme is ever tangential, everything is connected in the truest sense. That it came together in the way it has, in storeys of stories, people, and voices - is literally life giving. The true value of representativeness in writing is realised in this book, and it has never read this good.
The experimental mix of literary and speculative fiction is brilliant, as are the incredible contemporary characters that draw on ancient Indigenous themes. Loved it.
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I don't even know what to write. I will be processing this for a while.
If you are wondering whether you should read it then yes you should. It's all so plausible as if she lived through it (even the paranormal stuff). This is enviably good writing but there's also something unassuming about it, it's a lot less pretentious than most.
I think I read one of the stories in an anthology a while back but it was still good on a second reading. I got this book from the library and will look at getting my own for easy rereading. I'd love to talk to smart writerly people about this book and hear their thoughts.
Utter brilliance (and I rarely think that about anything).
If you are wondering whether you should read it then yes you should. It's all so plausible as if she lived through it (even the paranormal stuff). This is enviably good writing but there's also something unassuming about it, it's a lot less pretentious than most.
I think I read one of the stories in an anthology a while back but it was still good on a second reading. I got this book from the library and will look at getting my own for easy rereading. I'd love to talk to smart writerly people about this book and hear their thoughts.
Utter brilliance (and I rarely think that about anything).