susie_and 's review for:

Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven

4.0

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This collection started to catch my interest in the first set of stories - Heat, made up of interwoven family histories - but it almost lost me with the dystopian middle section. I found the juxtapositions were a little bit heavy handed, then dystopian fiction can be like that. However I stuck with it because I felt a lil something. And final section - Light - was incredible. It really was. It helps you undo a lot of thinking about typical short stories. I love how unabashedly bleak parts were. I felt the country, the landscape was speaking as much as these characters were having their dilemmas and finding their way. I liked the honesty but understatedness of this section. Nothing was overblown here, whereas in the other sections it felt like sometimes there was excessive teasing out of metaphor.