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briandice's review
4.0
The end of (or rather, the destruction of) innocence.
A father that pimps his daughter at an all out Tongue Party.
Categorization of unnamable things, atrocities, niceities in nameless cities.
Dancing loving stinging jellyfish.
A husband's insatiable hunger. Devour the world.
The only reason this collection isn't five stars is because I've held that last star back in its cradle in hope that it will spawn another collection by Sarah Rose Etter. Because that's where these stories originated: the cold and naked shingled remains from the day of melancholic Creation.
A father that pimps his daughter at an all out Tongue Party.
Categorization of unnamable things, atrocities, niceities in nameless cities.
Dancing loving stinging jellyfish.
A husband's insatiable hunger. Devour the world.
The only reason this collection isn't five stars is because I've held that last star back in its cradle in hope that it will spawn another collection by Sarah Rose Etter. Because that's where these stories originated: the cold and naked shingled remains from the day of melancholic Creation.
tiredandspice's review
5.0
Every story in this basically just broke me
So of course, the logical thing to do is track down a physical copy, right??
So of course, the logical thing to do is track down a physical copy, right??
thegingerbreadhag's review against another edition
fast-paced
3.75
I devoured this book ! The writing style is so easy to get used to, each short story made me feel either weirded out, disgusted, or fascinated, especially the one about tongues. I think my favorite is the last one. Also I'm happy to have read reviews here because if for the most part I understood the metaphorical meaning behind the short stories, some completely left me wondering what the hell I just read, like the cake one. Still for me it's a 3.75/5. I really liked it, I'm happy to have read it after being recommended it, and I would recommend it, but it hasn't wrecked my reader's life either. It's simply a good book, nothing less nothing more
shimmer's review
5.0
I recently had the pleasure and privilege of hearing Sarah Rose Etter read the title story from this collection, and now that I've read the book that story feels like the pivot point of the set. "Tongue Party" forces us, through an incredible turnabout midway through, to wonder about the implications of telling a story straight versus telling it through filters of metaphor and fantasy and suggestion, and to ask which story is "real." I don't want to spoil that powerful turn by explaining it here, but as perhaps the most literal, entirely realistic moment of the book it became a lens through which I read the rest, always aware both of the strange surface (eg, a father wearing a chicken mask to cover his grief, kidnapped dates locked in glass rooms, or a tide of washed up koalas) and of wondering what "real" experience such strangeness distorts or obscures. That made for exciting, provocative tensions between reader, writer, and text.
The strongest of these stories suggest a larger world their characters inhabit, rather than a discrete, contained storyworld. "Chicken Father," for one, complicates grief both within a family and socially at once, and "Husband Feeder" takes what in plain description might sound like too literal an image of consumption to take on the richness it eventually does through complications of gender, wealth, and culture. If anything, I would have liked to see that aspect of the collection pushed further, because a few moments felt like doors opened but not quite stepped through. Not because the stories lack anything as they are—far from it—but turning questions asked of the domestic onto other spheres, too, might have added another dimension.
"Koala Tide," for instance (and fair warning, bit of a spoiler), uses dead koalas washing ashore as the jarring, monkey's paw-esque fulfillment of childhood desires. It's a terrific story, building up then subverting readerly assumptions and expectations several times in its course. The koalas seem arbitrary as an animal, chosen perhaps for their cuteness or for the sound of their name, but koalas are also real, and endangered, and geographically specific, so a story about heaps of them dead on an ambiguous shoreline has implications beyond the aesthetic. Not that the story should be "about" endangered species or koala ecology or anything so didactic, but perhaps questions raised elsewhere in the collection about the realistic and the fantastic could have been engaged to ask not just how we use metaphor to make sense of experience but also where our particular metaphors come from and why our choice of them matters in a reader's world as much as a character's (particularly, perhaps, a reader who tends toward ecocritical reading and is a little obsessive about animals as metaphor. Ahem.)
The strongest of these stories suggest a larger world their characters inhabit, rather than a discrete, contained storyworld. "Chicken Father," for one, complicates grief both within a family and socially at once, and "Husband Feeder" takes what in plain description might sound like too literal an image of consumption to take on the richness it eventually does through complications of gender, wealth, and culture. If anything, I would have liked to see that aspect of the collection pushed further, because a few moments felt like doors opened but not quite stepped through. Not because the stories lack anything as they are—far from it—but turning questions asked of the domestic onto other spheres, too, might have added another dimension.
"Koala Tide," for instance (and fair warning, bit of a spoiler), uses dead koalas washing ashore as the jarring, monkey's paw-esque fulfillment of childhood desires. It's a terrific story, building up then subverting readerly assumptions and expectations several times in its course. The koalas seem arbitrary as an animal, chosen perhaps for their cuteness or for the sound of their name, but koalas are also real, and endangered, and geographically specific, so a story about heaps of them dead on an ambiguous shoreline has implications beyond the aesthetic. Not that the story should be "about" endangered species or koala ecology or anything so didactic, but perhaps questions raised elsewhere in the collection about the realistic and the fantastic could have been engaged to ask not just how we use metaphor to make sense of experience but also where our particular metaphors come from and why our choice of them matters in a reader's world as much as a character's (particularly, perhaps, a reader who tends toward ecocritical reading and is a little obsessive about animals as metaphor. Ahem.)
dannewton's review
5.0
You could call these stories disturbing, bizarre, and surreal. You could also call these stories imaginative or creative and fresh. One thing you cannot call these stories is dull. I read the book in a single sitting and will likely do so again in the near future.
There is a certain darkness lying in some of these stories, a darkness I don't see too often in the things I've been reading. It's as if any of the stories could turn on you, the reader, at any moment.
There is a certain darkness lying in some of these stories, a darkness I don't see too often in the things I've been reading. It's as if any of the stories could turn on you, the reader, at any moment.
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