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maggie_hart's review
3.0
As with all short story collections, I liked some and didn’t like others.
Favorites were A Ravishing Sun, Sugar Island, Bears Among the Living, and Ten Year Affair.
Favorites were A Ravishing Sun, Sugar Island, Bears Among the Living, and Ten Year Affair.
karencarlson's review
4.25
I titled my wrap-up post about this edition "It's About Time (Among Other Things) because time was a prominent feature in the stories, showing up in different ways. Multiple timelines blended together, or layered on top of each other, showing how past and future affect present. Or, time provided a mirror with which to view the past; in some cases, the story was about how that mirror could be distorted to yield a particular desired past, rather than reality. One story split apart time, and reality, into different streams, showing possibilities, yet returning to the core story at the end. Several stories showed how time changes our view of everything, past, present, and future. History-making via storytelling, another way of looking at time, was a central feature in several stories. As always, family and relationships come front and center in many stories. COVID appeared explicitly in only two stories.
I had to struggle with some stories; in two cases, I came to love that struggle. And, I'll admit, some stories didn’t catch my fancy at all. That’s inevitable; the purpose of BASS is to bring together a variety of fiction, so it’s unlikely each story will work for any individual person.
Overall, it was a good year.
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.
I had to struggle with some stories; in two cases, I came to love that struggle. And, I'll admit, some stories didn’t catch my fancy at all. That’s inevitable; the purpose of BASS is to bring together a variety of fiction, so it’s unlikely each story will work for any individual person.
Overall, it was a good year.
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.
kirstiecat's review
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
My favorite story in this collection was Kenan Orhan's The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra but Foster by Bryan Washington and The Ghost Birds by Karen Russell were also highlights. All of these stories are worth reading and feature a lot of different topics-a dystopian future, political oppression, family, COVID, you name it.
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