Scan barcode
nnewbykew's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
hcooper333's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
jodinicole2023's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
4.0
regenherz's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
wothmings's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
balletbookworm's review against another edition
3.0
A lot of good stories in this collection, particularly ones where the world of the story seems "normal" then one small twist reveals that it is actually dystopic (ex. "Selkie Stories Are for Lovers", "Honey Bear" and "How to Get Back to be Forest"). These stories cluster in the front half of the book (Tender Bodies) and the collection feels unbalanced. It didn't gel as a collection for me.
bosstweed's review
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
I definitely really enjoyed some of the stories, the earlier stories more so, but I just wasn’t feeling drawn in by most of them. They were intriguing but for some reason weren’t interesting to me. The prose was not bad, and was one of the main reasons for really drawing in my attention.
salamymommy's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
situinabook's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
charlotekerstenauthor's review against another edition
I’m contractually obligated to gush about Sofia Samatar every few months – so it always has been, and so it always will be. This is just the way of the world. Today’s book is her 2017 short story collection Tender. Spoilers follow!
Selkie Stories Are for Losers: a girl grieves the loss of her mother, who may or may not have been a selkie. This one beautifully captures the central sense of loss, sorrow, betrayal and anger that is directed at the girl’s mother because of her abandonment; interwoven are tender snippets that belie her growing feelings for her friend Mona and betray hope for the future.
Ogres of East Africa: Alibhai works for a European intent on hunting the famed ogres of East Africa. In this story’s exploration of colonialism, each ogre is a fragment of strange and beautiful mythology from an untouched world, and Alibhai’s master can only see his own triumph over them: trophies to be won, conquests to be the victor of. Alibhai rebels in his own quiet way with the notes he writes in the margins of his master’s papers.
Walkdog: a girl’s essay about the environment tells the story of a mythical creature and her bullied boyfriend’s disappearance. This might be my favorite of the bunch – the chosen medium of a middle schooler’s poorly-written essay is brilliantly achieved. The student’s battle with guilt and the cruelty of her peers is a heart-breaking one interwoven with the story of a creature of urban legend known as the Walkdog.
Olimpia’s Ghost: an epistolary story told in a young woman’s unanswered letters to a Sigmund who is PROBABLY Sigmund Freud, chronicling either her descent into madness or the strange magic of her living dreams. Okay, so I think this one has something to do with Freud’s 1919’s essay “The Uncanny,” where he analyzed an 1816 short story by ETA Hoffmann called The Sandman, dealing with an automaton named Olympia (also the name of the young woman in this story). I looked up the essay and read like 2 sentences of it before remembering why Freud is my mortal enemy, and decided to stick with this dreamlike story by Samatar instead.
The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle: a person whose identity I will NOT spoil tells a series of tales surrounding the mythical lovers Mahliya and Mauhub. This one reminded me a lot of In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente – it was something about the graceful, digressive nature of the story-telling along with the framing device of several short stories coming together to form a whole, cohesive narrative.
Honey Bear: parents take their daughter on a trip to the beach, but the day is ruined by supernatural occurrences. This story is very much one of a family desperate for normalcy in a world gone wrong, with a mother trying to placate and keep the peace and a father much less equipped to deal with the difficulties of his reality as a parent to a supernatural being.
How I Met the Ghoul: an interviewer talks to a ghoul who thrives on waste and chaos. I loved the idea of an interviewer trying to get a beat on an ancient supernatural being by asking her what her favorite movie is (it’s Titanic), and I especially enjoyed the impossible ways the ghoul was described: “one of her ears was like a dead mine-shaft, the other was like a window in some desolate bed-and-breakfast of the plains.”
Those: a dutiful daughter cares for her father as he reminisces about his strange experiences while overseeing a farm where natives labor in colonial Africa. This one is another thoughtful meditation on the impacts of colonialism: its dehumanization and brutality. It’s especially impactful to hear the stories told by the colonizer’s viewpoint, with its casual othering and justifications for violence. The horror element of this story could possibly be considered one of redistribution for the wrongs committed in colonialism, and Sarah’s dutiful, placid veneer belies inner conflict over the loss of her mother and her existence as a biracial woman.
A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals: an automaton dreams of life as a real woman in a world that has been destroyed. This one made me feel a little stupid, because as I read it I had very little understanding of how the automaton’s dreams related to her reality as a mechanical invention and gift to the king. Confusing, yes, but the automaton’s voice is vividly captured.
How to Get Back to the Forest: a grown woman reflects upon her formative experiences at Camp in a dystopian future. I read a review of this story that compared it to Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and I think that comparison holds up really well. There’s a similar surface level idyllic childhood with a dark undercurrent of wrongness and uncertainty, as well as a friend who questions everything and struggles to fit in.
Tender: a tender for a radioactive waste containment facility, a woman reflects on the choices that led herself, and humanity as a whole, to the current state of affairs. A parallel is drawn between toxicity in the radioactive sense and toxicity in the context of personality and relationships, and Samatar examines the idea of nuclear developments as progress.
A Brief History of Nonduality Studies: sorry, I can’t even provide a summary for this one because I wouldn’t even know where to begin. If Samatar can be a little esoteric at times, a little infatuated with her obscure, opaque quotations and her freewheeling prose, I think this is usually present in small doses and is therefore manageable. This story is more or less entirely comprised of these things, so I struggled with it a great deal.
Dawn and then Maiden: a maiden’s love struggles with a sense of unreality and she braves a confrontation with the Lady, all-powerful ruler of questionable benevolence, to save his life. Here I think Samatar’s writing is at its most beautiful, and this one had the sense of a metaphysical fairy-tale.
Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold: In this essay Samatar reflects on her relationship to the concepts of land, home and flight in a comparison to The Wizard of Oz. This story’s structure is one of the most interesting of the bunch, with sections no longer than a paragraph or two all spinning around and returning to the essay’s central ideas.
An Account of the Land of Witches: an account of the Land of the Witches by an enslaved woman chronicles her initiation into the magic of dreaming and her escape from slavery. This is followed by a refutation of her account, a refutation of a refutation and the reflections of a grad student studying all three documents but currently caught in a war-torn country, unable to return to her studies in the United States. The final episode features a company of dreamers on a quest together. This is my favorite story of the bunch – in addition to the power of the first story’s examination of an enslaved woman’s experiences and her escape, I loved the vivid, bizarre descriptions of the Land of the Witches, the structure of refutations and refutations of refutations is clever and the tie-in to present day conflicts is also very resonant. Out of all the stories in this collection, I think this one best represents Samatar’s amazing imagination and scope of story-telling ability.
Meet Me in Iram: a young woman’s family lives in the lost city of Iram, mentioned in the Quran, One Thousand and One Nights and the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The descriptions of the lost city are fascinating and beautiful, and I think Iram comes to represent a kind of liminal space absent from loss and pain.
Request for an Extension on the Clarity: a solitary woman lives on board a maintenance spacecraft and requests an extension of her menial job. I loved the way that this one explored the tradition of Hotep black literature, focused on Afrocentrisim and glorified black nationalism, interweaving the narrator’s experience of never quite belonging with her love of solitude in space.
The Closest Thing to Animals: in the future, a woman struggles with her jealously in friendship with a successful artist. This is perhaps the least speculative of the bunch, but the main protagonist’s insecurity and jealously are well-realized and I really liked hearing about the friend’s environmental art.
Fallow: tells the story of a fundamental Christian settlement on a barren, harsh planet. This one is the longest of the bunch, I think, and is divided up into portions focusing on specific members of the community and their stories. It does a beautiful job of capturing the bleak essence of a Puritan-esque community trapped on an isolated world, as well as the psychological repercussions of living in such a community.
The Red Thread: another epistolary story, this one from the perspective of a girl writing to her brother and traveling with her mother after a revolution of some kind has taken place. My favorite part of this one was trying to piece together exactly what happened in the revolution and its aftermath.
Selkie Stories Are for Losers: a girl grieves the loss of her mother, who may or may not have been a selkie. This one beautifully captures the central sense of loss, sorrow, betrayal and anger that is directed at the girl’s mother because of her abandonment; interwoven are tender snippets that belie her growing feelings for her friend Mona and betray hope for the future.
Ogres of East Africa: Alibhai works for a European intent on hunting the famed ogres of East Africa. In this story’s exploration of colonialism, each ogre is a fragment of strange and beautiful mythology from an untouched world, and Alibhai’s master can only see his own triumph over them: trophies to be won, conquests to be the victor of. Alibhai rebels in his own quiet way with the notes he writes in the margins of his master’s papers.
Walkdog: a girl’s essay about the environment tells the story of a mythical creature and her bullied boyfriend’s disappearance. This might be my favorite of the bunch – the chosen medium of a middle schooler’s poorly-written essay is brilliantly achieved. The student’s battle with guilt and the cruelty of her peers is a heart-breaking one interwoven with the story of a creature of urban legend known as the Walkdog.
Olimpia’s Ghost: an epistolary story told in a young woman’s unanswered letters to a Sigmund who is PROBABLY Sigmund Freud, chronicling either her descent into madness or the strange magic of her living dreams. Okay, so I think this one has something to do with Freud’s 1919’s essay “The Uncanny,” where he analyzed an 1816 short story by ETA Hoffmann called The Sandman, dealing with an automaton named Olympia (also the name of the young woman in this story). I looked up the essay and read like 2 sentences of it before remembering why Freud is my mortal enemy, and decided to stick with this dreamlike story by Samatar instead.
The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle: a person whose identity I will NOT spoil tells a series of tales surrounding the mythical lovers Mahliya and Mauhub. This one reminded me a lot of In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente – it was something about the graceful, digressive nature of the story-telling along with the framing device of several short stories coming together to form a whole, cohesive narrative.
Honey Bear: parents take their daughter on a trip to the beach, but the day is ruined by supernatural occurrences. This story is very much one of a family desperate for normalcy in a world gone wrong, with a mother trying to placate and keep the peace and a father much less equipped to deal with the difficulties of his reality as a parent to a supernatural being.
How I Met the Ghoul: an interviewer talks to a ghoul who thrives on waste and chaos. I loved the idea of an interviewer trying to get a beat on an ancient supernatural being by asking her what her favorite movie is (it’s Titanic), and I especially enjoyed the impossible ways the ghoul was described: “one of her ears was like a dead mine-shaft, the other was like a window in some desolate bed-and-breakfast of the plains.”
Those: a dutiful daughter cares for her father as he reminisces about his strange experiences while overseeing a farm where natives labor in colonial Africa. This one is another thoughtful meditation on the impacts of colonialism: its dehumanization and brutality. It’s especially impactful to hear the stories told by the colonizer’s viewpoint, with its casual othering and justifications for violence. The horror element of this story could possibly be considered one of redistribution for the wrongs committed in colonialism, and Sarah’s dutiful, placid veneer belies inner conflict over the loss of her mother and her existence as a biracial woman.
A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals: an automaton dreams of life as a real woman in a world that has been destroyed. This one made me feel a little stupid, because as I read it I had very little understanding of how the automaton’s dreams related to her reality as a mechanical invention and gift to the king. Confusing, yes, but the automaton’s voice is vividly captured.
How to Get Back to the Forest: a grown woman reflects upon her formative experiences at Camp in a dystopian future. I read a review of this story that compared it to Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and I think that comparison holds up really well. There’s a similar surface level idyllic childhood with a dark undercurrent of wrongness and uncertainty, as well as a friend who questions everything and struggles to fit in.
Tender: a tender for a radioactive waste containment facility, a woman reflects on the choices that led herself, and humanity as a whole, to the current state of affairs. A parallel is drawn between toxicity in the radioactive sense and toxicity in the context of personality and relationships, and Samatar examines the idea of nuclear developments as progress.
A Brief History of Nonduality Studies: sorry, I can’t even provide a summary for this one because I wouldn’t even know where to begin. If Samatar can be a little esoteric at times, a little infatuated with her obscure, opaque quotations and her freewheeling prose, I think this is usually present in small doses and is therefore manageable. This story is more or less entirely comprised of these things, so I struggled with it a great deal.
Dawn and then Maiden: a maiden’s love struggles with a sense of unreality and she braves a confrontation with the Lady, all-powerful ruler of questionable benevolence, to save his life. Here I think Samatar’s writing is at its most beautiful, and this one had the sense of a metaphysical fairy-tale.
Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold: In this essay Samatar reflects on her relationship to the concepts of land, home and flight in a comparison to The Wizard of Oz. This story’s structure is one of the most interesting of the bunch, with sections no longer than a paragraph or two all spinning around and returning to the essay’s central ideas.
An Account of the Land of Witches: an account of the Land of the Witches by an enslaved woman chronicles her initiation into the magic of dreaming and her escape from slavery. This is followed by a refutation of her account, a refutation of a refutation and the reflections of a grad student studying all three documents but currently caught in a war-torn country, unable to return to her studies in the United States. The final episode features a company of dreamers on a quest together. This is my favorite story of the bunch – in addition to the power of the first story’s examination of an enslaved woman’s experiences and her escape, I loved the vivid, bizarre descriptions of the Land of the Witches, the structure of refutations and refutations of refutations is clever and the tie-in to present day conflicts is also very resonant. Out of all the stories in this collection, I think this one best represents Samatar’s amazing imagination and scope of story-telling ability.
Meet Me in Iram: a young woman’s family lives in the lost city of Iram, mentioned in the Quran, One Thousand and One Nights and the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The descriptions of the lost city are fascinating and beautiful, and I think Iram comes to represent a kind of liminal space absent from loss and pain.
Request for an Extension on the Clarity: a solitary woman lives on board a maintenance spacecraft and requests an extension of her menial job. I loved the way that this one explored the tradition of Hotep black literature, focused on Afrocentrisim and glorified black nationalism, interweaving the narrator’s experience of never quite belonging with her love of solitude in space.
The Closest Thing to Animals: in the future, a woman struggles with her jealously in friendship with a successful artist. This is perhaps the least speculative of the bunch, but the main protagonist’s insecurity and jealously are well-realized and I really liked hearing about the friend’s environmental art.
Fallow: tells the story of a fundamental Christian settlement on a barren, harsh planet. This one is the longest of the bunch, I think, and is divided up into portions focusing on specific members of the community and their stories. It does a beautiful job of capturing the bleak essence of a Puritan-esque community trapped on an isolated world, as well as the psychological repercussions of living in such a community.
The Red Thread: another epistolary story, this one from the perspective of a girl writing to her brother and traveling with her mother after a revolution of some kind has taken place. My favorite part of this one was trying to piece together exactly what happened in the revolution and its aftermath.