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hayleyrhiannon's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- 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
4.75
goosemixtapes's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
things brenda peynado is interested in: the strange, the unsettling, small magics, pariahs, stories narrated by a first-person-plural "we," latine identity, class divides, allegorical symbolism, bodies and what's done to them, stories that leave you a little unsettled. things i am interested in: brenda peynado's mind. this collection is sixteen stories. some of them felt a little crooked (too short, or too long, or too distant), but all of them are strange and beautiful. my favorites:
1. Thoughts and Prayers
1. Thoughts and Prayers
Our teachers mentioned the shootings, but then moved on to the day's lessons. If they had to stop for every shooting, they said, the whole world would stop. Shouldn't the whole world have stopped? But I didn't know how to stop it.
in which a school shooting strikes an american suburb where families pray for safety to the angels on their roofs, angels that mostly chew cud and don't blink. this is the perfect start to this collection, because it's thematically emblematic of so much of the stories to follow and because it's throat-grabbing. i'm not sure how i feel about the ending, but i think this is the one that's going to stick with me the most.
2. The Drownings
If only we could live in every moment forever. If only the answers to our lives could be captured in a bottle we could drink from again instead of looking back across unreachable chasms, our own out-of-body experiences.
peynado likes stories where almost everything is the same except for one little unusual twist in the world. in this one, it's that a rash of drownings take lives from every generation, kind of like clockwork, and the current teenagers are fascinated by the immortality their swimming pools seem to promise. i was going to say that i don't know why it got me so bad, but i guess stories about adolescence and death as freedom will do that to me. also the prose is BREATHTAKING
3. We Work In Miraculous Cages
I thought about how they had spent not just their lives, but our lives, too, gobbled up or snorted up or injected into their faces all that good fortune of the eighties and the dot-com boom, them laying their heads back into the shampoo bowl and me wasting all my understanding about the world--fluid dynamics, the great monologues of literature, the construction of engines, the physics of flight--on rubbing their skin over their bones.
no scifi-fantasy here; just cold capitalist dystopia. i don't know if it's the character voice that grabbed me or just the way this story makes stark the sheer horror of the way work grinds us down, but ohhhhh man. oh my god. peynado's prose makes me crazy bonkers
4. The Kite Maker
For them, it was just a story. They never got to the point of horror, the point when we were sorry, when the tide turned, after we wanted them to surrender in the human way, arms up, after we wanted them to fight back to absolve us, after we realized they could not be pushed to fight back, when we began to carry them into the hospitals and the morgue, the doctors trying as best as they could to understand our differences, how to get under their armor, how to splint antennae together, where the vital organs were.
this one took a little while to grow on me--it's one of the longer stories in the collection--but by the end i was transfixed and also ruined. it follows the aftermath of an alien arrival, one that humans reacted to with violence; it's a story asking how we can deal with the aftermath of a terrible, terrible crime. it makes me want to pull my hair out
these are my personal favorites, but the entire collection is worth a read (the story chosen for last place is a REALLY really good finale, for example). i have some gripes (the number of stories narrated by a plural "we" was a lot, and started to blend together; some of the stories felt more exercising than heartfelt), but i'm consistently impressed by the way peynado offers all these little glimpses into strange and familiar worlds. really excited to read more of her writing, because how did i miss it for this long.
sydneyrp143's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
elisabethian's review against another edition
5.0
terrifyingly beautiful. each story is so crazy, unique, and easily indistinguishable that i forget about the previous story told, yet when i review one of the previous stories, it’s as if i had just read the story an hour ago. each story shares its theme in a way that makes it easy to understand, yet expresses itself so creatively that no story felt over-told or boring. overall an amazing and recommendable read.
(months later, i still think about most of the stories)
(months later, i still think about most of the stories)
dani_nzd's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.75
rtdarden2's review against another edition
5.0
Packed with stories that make you think, make you question, and pull your heart strings all different directions.
kangaruthie's review against another edition
4.0
This is a very unique collection of short stories, which use fantasy, sci-fi, and magical realism to comment on the plights of human society. For example, my favorite story used an alien invasion on Earth as a metaphor for immigration. I really loved a few stories in this book, but many of them were pretty bizarre and left me wondering what the point was. The collection on the whole is also very dark - each story dealt with heavy subject matters and did not provide any reprieve.
breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.5