Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.59 AVERAGE
3.59 AVERAGE
mysterious
Some interesting ideas, but I think her writing shines most when she has a bit more time to unspool characters. The long-form story was the best.
Daisy Johnson's FEN is steeped in the surreal landscape of the English Fens. Here, a girl can starve herself into an eel, a dead man may turn into a fox, and witches lure men into their homes to eat them. It is at once a study in girlhood, coming of age, and mythic folklore. Though the stories in this collection are undeniably well-written and atmospheric, the collection as a whole doesn't quite come together. I was left with far too many questions and absolutely no answers as to what was actually happening in the collection and what wasn't. I kept waiting for the surreal elements to be grounded in some sort of reality, or for the stories (all set in the same town) to connect in some way, but neither happened. Overall, these stories were individually interesting, but I'm not sure they worked well as a collection.
Fascinating and provocative, the type of fantasy writing that seems like pure realism. Some stories were better than others imo. I really liked the first few and the last one, but not the ones in the middle as much. Good stuff about fish :)
I love connected short story collections. Seeing little mentions of one story in the next, spotting the central character from one in another—these things fill me with a silly kind of glee.
This collection is a foggy, grimy exploration of the fens and women and being trapped in the place you grew up in. The fantasy elements feel like the oily kind of folklore you might dredge up from the sea. Slippery and uncomfortable.
All in all, I had a good time.
This collection is a foggy, grimy exploration of the fens and women and being trapped in the place you grew up in. The fantasy elements feel like the oily kind of folklore you might dredge up from the sea. Slippery and uncomfortable.
All in all, I had a good time.
Esta madrugada terminé esta colección de cuentos que muerden y remuerden; Daisy Johnson camina paralelamente a Her Body and Other Parties de Carmen María Machado en tanto crea personajes, tramas y atmósferas con un halo de oscuridad y, al mismo tiempo, de certezas; si hay algo claro aquí es que cada una de las protagonistas sabe lo que quiere y no le importa meterse en un pantano, o ser un pantano, para lograrlo.
This one was mixed for me. I loved Johnson's novel, Everything Under, and these stories had a lot of the elements that resonated in that work - life in the lowlands and on the water, strange siblings and misted childhood remembrances, shadows of fairy tale and myth, a kind of removed sense of darkness, spinning and playing with sexuality and gender. There were absolutely some impressive stories in this collection, but overall it was a little affected for me. Kelly Link/Aimee Beder-esque in a way that felt dated and done. This should've been a quick read, but it ended up taking me a few days to push through because I didn't want to pick it up, and got quickly preoccupied and bored with the stories when actually reading. I'm probably giving this collection a harder time than it deserves, and might have been more patient if I hadn't been so impressed by Everything Under - Fen felt (probably accurately) like unfinished sketches for the more developed full-length novel that follows.
I really liked this collection. A couple of the stories are five stars for me, and even the ones that aren't, I commend for their uniqueness. All of them presented to me brand new ideas that I'd never seen anywhere else. One thing I really love when authors do is when they put Easter eggs from other stories into it. It makes it feel like one whole world. The stories are all very weird and strange but I think that was the goal. Good stuff.
This collection was made up of stories set in the slightly fantastical setting of the “fen”, where the lives of protagonists are shaped by the wildness of their surroundings. Some of these stories wove the two well, others I felt were just descriptions of this world and that lost me a bit. I was here for the intersection, the people doing weird things under weird influences, but sometimes I felt like the stories lacked purpose.
