humdrum_ts 's review for:

Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda

4.0

dark emotional sad medium-paced

---

I tend to read short story collections pretty slowly: I like to pause after each story and mull it over for a bit before moving on. When I’m reflecting on it, the first question I ask myself is always “Did I like that story?” It should be a yes or no answer, and yet midway through Ghostroots I found myself writing “I don’t know if ‘like’ is the appropriate word to use for this story.” Enjoyment is perhaps the wrong angle to approach a story that has left me feeling trapped and wondering if I’ll have nightmares when I turn out the light. Even when Aguda’s stories aren’t explicitly horror, they tend towards the horrific: it’s not hard to clock that nothing good is going to happen to that pet dog, or that a teenage girl’s relationship with her uncle won’t remain strictly paternal. Hell, even if it did stay paternal, that would be bad enough: parental love in Ghostroots is a twisted thing, a burden and a prison for parent and child, the suffering it causes only rivaled by the loneliness of the characters who have broken free of it. Did I like it? Nah dude, it bummed me out! Is it good? Oh, absolutely, in no small part because Aguda is a heck of a writer. While her range of topics is pretty narrow here, her presentation is so varied, from folktale to stream-of-consciousness and plenty in between, hopping about between tenses and voices with ease. And while the stories are upsetting, she (generally) inflicts pain with a precise, practiced turn of the screw - it’s a far cry from the numbing torrent of "misery porn." I was really impressed! Definitely going to pick up her debut novel next year when I am ready to be hurt again.

Favorite story: “The Wonders of the World”