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floralfox's review against another edition
3.0
"Tell Me Please" by Emily Chammah ★★★★
This story follows Amal, a young girl in Jordan who is very best friends with her cousin Omar. They write each other secret notes in English (when they only know a few words) and she falls in love with him. Unfortunately, it is improper for the two to spend any time alone together once Amal becomes "a woman" and they go several years without knowing or seeing each other. As an young adult in her parent's house, Amal finds Omar on Facebook. She starts a correspondence with him. She sees he has scanned and uploaded a photo of the two of them from childhood and used it as one of his profile pictures. Amal gets emboldened and pursues him with a mixture of reserve and rebellion. Chammah captures perfectly the nuance of desire and love that Amal has for Omar as she grows up as a conservative, innocent, and relatively shy woman.
Goldenhawk ★★★
2.5 stars rounded up. At Dinara's job, layoffs and firings have become rampant, but her narrow focus and hard work keeps her job. She adapts well to the needs of the company. But her coworkers suspect she is kept on as a "diversity hire" because she's a woman. Dinara keeps all information about herself close to the chest, even from the reader. One day Dinara joins the rest of the men she works with staring out the window at a hawk. Dinara suspects it is a "goldenhawk," like the street name close to her, because of its gold feathers. A coworker insists she is wrong; no such thing exists, he says, and it must be a red-tailed hawk. Dinara lets him believe he is right, but knows he is wrong. At the end of the day, she spies the goldenhawk's nest and knows she will keep its secret in the same way she keeps her own. The writing is good here, but because we know so little about Dinara and because so little happens, I feel it will not stick with me as long as some of the other stories in here. However, the more I have thought about it since reading it, the more I think I like it.
1000-Year-Old Ghosts ★★★★★
Katie is a young girl who learns from her Popo (grandmother) how to pickle memories so that she can forget. Their obsession over pickling all kinds of memories upsets Katie's mother, who insists that remembering is good even when it is painful. The narrative is interwoven with some of Popo's memories throughout her life that even she cannot truly remember now. This story is not only beautifully written, but captures the pain of remembering, the pain of forgetting, and the difficulty of straddling two different cultures. How do we remember our past, our homeland, ourselves, and not yearn for it?
Edwin Chase of Nantucket by Ben Shattuck ★★★★★
This was not a story I expected to like. When in the second paragraph I learned it was set in 1796 in Nantucket, I was like, "Uggggggh, this is so not my jam." But damn. Shattuck's writing style and his ability to make things beautiful, curious, and tender totally worked for me. At the end, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is a chapter from a novel Shattuck is working on. I'll definitely be reading it. One of the best most beautiful passages is when Edwin prepares dinner for his mother and the two mysterious guests:
"Why is it that you do all the cooking here?" Will said.
Because my father had started lining up his fingernail clippings on the mantel. Because he'd sometimes walk outside without his shoes. Because he'd leave me and Laurel alone for hours while he walked. I'd followed him a few times. Mostly he'd just go until he found a spot out of the wind, sit down, and do nothing, miss dinner. She, at first, had gone looking for him. but then, one night, she said to me when I returned from the saltworks, "I don't care what you eat, but I'm not cooking anymore." She put her mother's cookbook for me on the table. She might have a pickled beet for dinner. Or a boiled egg. A handful of nuts.
So I started cooking. In Dad's long disappearances, I improved my recipes. Under the storms battering the house, cooking was the one thing I could control. Everything changes for the better with heat and time: onions go sweet with butter; potatoes soften. Of the raking, mucking, harrowing, it was the hours inside, out of the wind, in the kitchen, where I felt the weight lift away. Under our feet, in the cellar, with blocks of ice from the pond, I kept cheese, a bushel of quinces, apples, dried cherries, pears, a side of dried venison. Turnips and potatoes. And, depending on the season, I put berries into pies: gooseberries, strawberries, meal plums, cranberries, beach plums. When Laurel retreated to the bedroom early, I improved my dessert recipes. I made custards, cranberry tarts, ginger and treacle cakes, pound cakes, bread pudding, and hazelnut cake. I'd leave Dad a plate on the table for when he returned.
"Because I like the warm kitchen," I said to Will then.
A Message by Ruth Serven ★★
This is a very short story that uses the second person. Usually I can get behind that, but it took me way too long to figure out who the actual narrator was (I think she's talking to her friend?) So the narrator doesn't really matter at all, but the narrator is helping a friend (or neighbor?) contact her father who is in Serbia. The story starts over and over with dialogue as someone (presumably the friend/neighbor) recounts the start of her own story, whether that was the parents meeting, the father getting stuck in Serbia with no money and passport, etc... Ultimately I spent too much time trying to figure out what was going on and with whom. It took me out of the story.
The Handler ★★★★
After a somewhat bitter break-up, a woman moves to Alaska to be a dog-handler for a man and his 13-year-old deaf daughter. He's training to be in the Itidarod, the daughter desperately wants to be his companion and resents the new handler for her place. The woman sends lovelorn letters to her ex repeatedly inviting him to come up and see the dogs. After some hardships and tragedy, the woman realizes she is happy here, and is glad to have kept it from her ex so it is hers alone to enjoy.
The Manual Alphabet ★★
State Facts for the New Age ★★★1/2
The Asphodel Meadow ★★★
A Modern Marriage ★★★1/2
This story follows Amal, a young girl in Jordan who is very best friends with her cousin Omar. They write each other secret notes in English (when they only know a few words) and she falls in love with him. Unfortunately, it is improper for the two to spend any time alone together once Amal becomes "a woman" and they go several years without knowing or seeing each other. As an young adult in her parent's house, Amal finds Omar on Facebook. She starts a correspondence with him. She sees he has scanned and uploaded a photo of the two of them from childhood and used it as one of his profile pictures. Amal gets emboldened and pursues him with a mixture of reserve and rebellion. Chammah captures perfectly the nuance of desire and love that Amal has for Omar as she grows up as a conservative, innocent, and relatively shy woman.
Goldenhawk ★★★
2.5 stars rounded up. At Dinara's job, layoffs and firings have become rampant, but her narrow focus and hard work keeps her job. She adapts well to the needs of the company. But her coworkers suspect she is kept on as a "diversity hire" because she's a woman. Dinara keeps all information about herself close to the chest, even from the reader. One day Dinara joins the rest of the men she works with staring out the window at a hawk. Dinara suspects it is a "goldenhawk," like the street name close to her, because of its gold feathers. A coworker insists she is wrong; no such thing exists, he says, and it must be a red-tailed hawk. Dinara lets him believe he is right, but knows he is wrong. At the end of the day, she spies the goldenhawk's nest and knows she will keep its secret in the same way she keeps her own. The writing is good here, but because we know so little about Dinara and because so little happens, I feel it will not stick with me as long as some of the other stories in here. However, the more I have thought about it since reading it, the more I think I like it.
1000-Year-Old Ghosts ★★★★★
Katie is a young girl who learns from her Popo (grandmother) how to pickle memories so that she can forget. Their obsession over pickling all kinds of memories upsets Katie's mother, who insists that remembering is good even when it is painful. The narrative is interwoven with some of Popo's memories throughout her life that even she cannot truly remember now. This story is not only beautifully written, but captures the pain of remembering, the pain of forgetting, and the difficulty of straddling two different cultures. How do we remember our past, our homeland, ourselves, and not yearn for it?
Edwin Chase of Nantucket by Ben Shattuck ★★★★★
This was not a story I expected to like. When in the second paragraph I learned it was set in 1796 in Nantucket, I was like, "Uggggggh, this is so not my jam." But damn. Shattuck's writing style and his ability to make things beautiful, curious, and tender totally worked for me. At the end, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is a chapter from a novel Shattuck is working on. I'll definitely be reading it. One of the best most beautiful passages is when Edwin prepares dinner for his mother and the two mysterious guests:
"Why is it that you do all the cooking here?" Will said.
Because my father had started lining up his fingernail clippings on the mantel. Because he'd sometimes walk outside without his shoes. Because he'd leave me and Laurel alone for hours while he walked. I'd followed him a few times. Mostly he'd just go until he found a spot out of the wind, sit down, and do nothing, miss dinner. She, at first, had gone looking for him. but then, one night, she said to me when I returned from the saltworks, "I don't care what you eat, but I'm not cooking anymore." She put her mother's cookbook for me on the table. She might have a pickled beet for dinner. Or a boiled egg. A handful of nuts.
So I started cooking. In Dad's long disappearances, I improved my recipes. Under the storms battering the house, cooking was the one thing I could control. Everything changes for the better with heat and time: onions go sweet with butter; potatoes soften. Of the raking, mucking, harrowing, it was the hours inside, out of the wind, in the kitchen, where I felt the weight lift away. Under our feet, in the cellar, with blocks of ice from the pond, I kept cheese, a bushel of quinces, apples, dried cherries, pears, a side of dried venison. Turnips and potatoes. And, depending on the season, I put berries into pies: gooseberries, strawberries, meal plums, cranberries, beach plums. When Laurel retreated to the bedroom early, I improved my dessert recipes. I made custards, cranberry tarts, ginger and treacle cakes, pound cakes, bread pudding, and hazelnut cake. I'd leave Dad a plate on the table for when he returned.
"Because I like the warm kitchen," I said to Will then.
A Message by Ruth Serven ★★
This is a very short story that uses the second person. Usually I can get behind that, but it took me way too long to figure out who the actual narrator was (I think she's talking to her friend?) So the narrator doesn't really matter at all, but the narrator is helping a friend (or neighbor?) contact her father who is in Serbia. The story starts over and over with dialogue as someone (presumably the friend/neighbor) recounts the start of her own story, whether that was the parents meeting, the father getting stuck in Serbia with no money and passport, etc... Ultimately I spent too much time trying to figure out what was going on and with whom. It took me out of the story.
The Handler ★★★★
After a somewhat bitter break-up, a woman moves to Alaska to be a dog-handler for a man and his 13-year-old deaf daughter. He's training to be in the Itidarod, the daughter desperately wants to be his companion and resents the new handler for her place. The woman sends lovelorn letters to her ex repeatedly inviting him to come up and see the dogs. After some hardships and tragedy, the woman realizes she is happy here, and is glad to have kept it from her ex so it is hers alone to enjoy.
The Manual Alphabet ★★
State Facts for the New Age ★★★1/2
The Asphodel Meadow ★★★
A Modern Marriage ★★★1/2
johnson_erine4's review against another edition
5.0
This story was very sad. not the boo hoo kind of sadness but you just felt for the main character as she is going through her life and realizes she missed most of it (you'll find out what I'm talking about once you read it). It also shows how people deal with loss and the pursuit of happiness or at least contentedness. I listened through Levar Burton Reads. Great story
ladynigelia's review against another edition
3.0
LeVar Burton Reads episode 9
There's the important fantasy element of pickling memories, but the story also touches on being torn between two worlds. For the grandmother it's literally China and the US. For Katie, both worlds are in the US, but the cultures are still difficult to bridge. As an Asian American I recognized some of the painful comments made toward her.
Deciding how to deal with painful memories is a difficult balance. We do need to learn from our mistakes and if we forget, how will we learn? But wouldn't it be so much easier to pickle an especially traumatic memory so we could move past them more easily? Who are we if we don't remember our past? This thread also edges toward senility and Alzheimer's. They're not specifically addressed, but the undercurrent is there.
I think I prefer my stories to have clear morals rather than making me think too deeply about the meaning and who I am... This certainly does provoke a lot of questions.
There's the important fantasy element of pickling memories, but the story also touches on being torn between two worlds. For the grandmother it's literally China and the US. For Katie, both worlds are in the US, but the cultures are still difficult to bridge. As an Asian American I recognized some of the painful comments made toward her.
Deciding how to deal with painful memories is a difficult balance. We do need to learn from our mistakes and if we forget, how will we learn? But wouldn't it be so much easier to pickle an especially traumatic memory so we could move past them more easily? Who are we if we don't remember our past? This thread also edges toward senility and Alzheimer's. They're not specifically addressed, but the undercurrent is there.
I think I prefer my stories to have clear morals rather than making me think too deeply about the meaning and who I am... This certainly does provoke a lot of questions.
leftylauren's review against another edition
4.0
Reviewed specifically for "1000 Year Old Ghosts" by Laura Chow Reeve as read on Levar Burton Reads.
zamyatins_fears's review against another edition
2.0
Another short that I listened to via the Levar Burton Reads podcast. I really enjoyed the premise of this story. It's about three women who know how to pickle their memories in jars for safekeeping, allowing them to forget bad memories, without completely losing them. I felt that the story itself felt a little rushed and ended up feeling a little flat for me. I wish there had been more character exploration, as the characters felt a little wooden. Still, it was a cute story with a theme that I usually enjoy, it just didn't feel like the author explored the concept very much and some of the transitions as time passed seemed a little clumsy.
ellenrhudy's review against another edition
3.0
Most of the stories in this collection left me wanting a little more of them, but I'm excited by the idea of the collection and the diversity of voices represented. Laura Chow Reeve's "1000-Year-Old Ghosts" is a stunner and I think worth the price of admission. Emily Chammah's "Tell Me, Please" didn't quite deliver (for me, anyway) but the characters stuck with me. Definitely looking forward to the 2018 edition.
pearseanderson's review against another edition
3.0
I really tried to take my mind off news and work and read some random book this week, and it was this collection. It was fine, I did not enjoy the stories as much as I had hoped, so I am giving it a 7/10. The design was great, the intros from each lit mag editor were helpful, and overall this was a short, quick read. My favorites were Amber Caron's "The Handler," Amy Sauber's "State Facts for the New Age," which felt bordering on melodrama/satire, "Edwin Chase of Nantucket" by Ben Shattuck, and I guess that's it. I dunno, I wish I would've liked the others like 20% more than I did. Happy they were from so many interesting backgrounds and settings, though it all sort of became about hidden loves! So many hidden loves in these stories! Curious what the 2018 collection will include, I'm excited for Kleeman's judging process.
bhavani's review against another edition
4.0
Have you tried pickling vegetables? It's easy and a great way to preserve them, especially when they're wilting at the back of the refrigerator. But 1000-year-old ghosts subverts the idea of preservation. In this tale of memories, relationships, and traditions, the women use pickling as a way to remove their memories and deal with overwhelming sadness. As time goes by, they have jars of memories bottled away and they slowly dissolve like salt in water, until nothing remains...
For me, memories, be they good or bad, sad and embarrassing, cringe-worthy and regretful, these are the things that make up our lives and experiences. Being human means embracing all these things and learning to live with some while thriving despite others. They can lift us up or destroy us, depending on the choices that we make and the power we give them.
For me, memories, be they good or bad, sad and embarrassing, cringe-worthy and regretful, these are the things that make up our lives and experiences. Being human means embracing all these things and learning to live with some while thriving despite others. They can lift us up or destroy us, depending on the choices that we make and the power we give them.
slolley's review against another edition
5.0
This is, so far, my favorite story from the podcast: Levar Burton Reads. The premise is such a fascinating one. What if you could bottle up memories that you want to forget? Give this book a listen on the podcast it is a short story and worth the ride.
lisaajnine's review against another edition
2.0
Just couldn't get into it. Really liked some of the writing though, so I'm thinking it was just me.