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A review by ericderoulet
You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories by Octavia Cade
5.0
I received an advance review copy of You Are My Sunshine for free from BookSirens without any obligation to leave a review.
Grief and dread seep through the climate horror stories in this collection, and even in the pieces that are lightest in tone, the grim optimism underlying them feels hard-won. The stories in You Are My Sunshine are far from light, easy reads, but there's much to appreciate here, not only in the collection's timely themes but in the impressive prose and writing craft demonstrated.
There's a good amount of experimentation with style and form here, with the first few pieces straddling the line between poetry and prose. Likewise, stories range in scope from vignettes to full-fledged narratives, but even those shorter pieces which are relatively light on plot and characterization succeed at communicating the themes and moods that are central to the collection. (I suppose a reader who's unaccustomed to climate fiction might find this off-putting, but as I understand it, sounding preachy isn't really a concern when writing about ongoing crises and their ample evidence.) Ultimately, Cade employs an impressive variety of literary forms to embody grief over our planet's condition as well as possibilities, grim and otherwise, for our future.
"You are My Sunshine," the title story of this collection, is particularly impressive in its writing, taking us on a macabre, somewhat surrealist journey with surprises, parallelism, and foreshadowing all at once. If there's one downside to this colleciton, it might be that "You Are My Sunshine" outshines the other members of this collection, yet this is understandable given that the care that Cade clearly put into its craft.
Grief and dread seep through the climate horror stories in this collection, and even in the pieces that are lightest in tone, the grim optimism underlying them feels hard-won. The stories in You Are My Sunshine are far from light, easy reads, but there's much to appreciate here, not only in the collection's timely themes but in the impressive prose and writing craft demonstrated.
There's a good amount of experimentation with style and form here, with the first few pieces straddling the line between poetry and prose. Likewise, stories range in scope from vignettes to full-fledged narratives, but even those shorter pieces which are relatively light on plot and characterization succeed at communicating the themes and moods that are central to the collection. (I suppose a reader who's unaccustomed to climate fiction might find this off-putting, but as I understand it, sounding preachy isn't really a concern when writing about ongoing crises and their ample evidence.) Ultimately, Cade employs an impressive variety of literary forms to embody grief over our planet's condition as well as possibilities, grim and otherwise, for our future.
"You are My Sunshine," the title story of this collection, is particularly impressive in its writing, taking us on a macabre, somewhat surrealist journey with surprises, parallelism, and foreshadowing all at once. If there's one downside to this colleciton, it might be that "You Are My Sunshine" outshines the other members of this collection, yet this is understandable given that the care that Cade clearly put into its craft.