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A review by expendablemudge
Fireside Magazine Issue 60, October 2018 by Julia Rios, Danilo Campos
5.0
Formally like Nicholson Baker's [b:The Mezzanine|247000|The Mezzanine|Nicholson Baker|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1307064718s/247000.jpg|2340174] for the hyperlink generation, a tiny text telling a titanic story whose layers grow like the lamination in puff pastry. They're as buttery-rich as those layers, too.
Gailey thinks about things we all think about...what happens when something goes utterly irretrievably bad?...and then builds an armature of words to hang feelings on. We the audience stand back and look at the shapes while our minds assess and absorb the meanings. Like the best pastry-eating experiences, the mental exercise of consuming a Gailey story involves enjoyment of the whole while remaining aware of the subtle parts.
This is a genuinely moving story, about a universally relatable subject, that asks hard questions about awful predictions of tragedies to come. It's free online and takes at most 10 minutes to read (you'll want to go back and re-experience some subtleties), and fully deserves its nomination for the 2019 Hugo Award for Short Fiction.
Gailey thinks about things we all think about...what happens when something goes utterly irretrievably bad?...and then builds an armature of words to hang feelings on. We the audience stand back and look at the shapes while our minds assess and absorb the meanings. Like the best pastry-eating experiences, the mental exercise of consuming a Gailey story involves enjoyment of the whole while remaining aware of the subtle parts.
This is a genuinely moving story, about a universally relatable subject, that asks hard questions about awful predictions of tragedies to come. It's free online and takes at most 10 minutes to read (you'll want to go back and re-experience some subtleties), and fully deserves its nomination for the 2019 Hugo Award for Short Fiction.