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A review by speculativebecky
Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology by Charles Tan
3.0
As is often the case with short story collections, and especially with anthologies collecting multiple authors, I found the stories in this volume to be very uneven. I do wonder whether some of the stories would have connected more had I been familiar with the storytelling traditions they were riffing on, and I acknowledge that I’m not the best reviewer here since I’m not the target audience. Although not my favorite collection of late, this book was pretty different than any I’ve read previously, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend picking it up if you’re into diverse speculative fiction.
My favorite stories were Two Women Worth Watching by Andrew Drilon, which started the collection off brilliantly with a tale of two women having dinner, one a famous actress and the other a nobody who nonetheless has an enormous captivated audience of loyal ghosts who follow her life story; and The Stranger at my Grandmother’s Wake by Fidelis Tan, an intriguing story about an old woman waiting on her deathbed for the reappearance of an old friend she met only once, years earlier at her grandmother’s wake. The story that will perhaps stick with me the longest, mostly due to our present circumstances, was The Perpetual Day by Crystal Koo, which envisions a global pandemic in which the ability to sleep is suddenly lost
My favorite stories were Two Women Worth Watching by Andrew Drilon, which started the collection off brilliantly with a tale of two women having dinner, one a famous actress and the other a nobody who nonetheless has an enormous captivated audience of loyal ghosts who follow her life story; and The Stranger at my Grandmother’s Wake by Fidelis Tan, an intriguing story about an old woman waiting on her deathbed for the reappearance of an old friend she met only once, years earlier at her grandmother’s wake. The story that will perhaps stick with me the longest, mostly due to our present circumstances, was The Perpetual Day by Crystal Koo, which envisions a global pandemic in which the ability to sleep is suddenly lost