A review by tallangryplanet
Fantastica - Surreal Prose & Poetry by Andrea Lightfoot

1.0

Look, I don't like giving bad ratings. At all. I am well aware of the effort that goes into writing things and I don't like to put down that effort. But I just didn't vibe with this book at all, despite wanting to like it so bad. 

Fantastica is an intriguing world, but that's about the only redeeming quality. Some of the poems were cute and the yoga meditation sections made me wish I could float like the characters, but this does not come close to outweighing all of the issues.The book is full of fantasy clichés (not tropes), and they're not even the good ones. It feels like the author took everything she'd heard in children's tales and scrambled it together in a new setting. Goblings are rude little hoarders who just wanna steal, black magic is Bad and white magic is The Solution To Everyone's Problems. 

And then, the thing that made this collection go from "forgettable" to "despicable": the glaring fatphobia. At first I thought it was just something casual, the author having been sold on stereotypes by the beauty industry, and who hasn't fallen for that at some point? But I don't actually think it's a small issue at all. One of the short stories is about a fat girl who is very self conscious about her body when she first goes to the gym, and then she meets a skinny, fashionable girl who changes her life. She "dreamt of having a lovely slim figure" and then went on to work at a gym, presumably once she reached her ideal level of slimness. Another story has a character suffer abuse from her aunt, and then “The monstrous thing was asleep in her armchair and she called me lazy! What a complete hypocrite. She was quite fat too. Nothing against fat people. I know quite a few overweight people.” The fatness isn't even relevant, the aunt is just a bully who happens to be fat. The next paragraph emphasizes how not-fatphobic the protagonist is because she has a fat neighbour who bakes cake. How progressive!

This book somehow managed to make me intrigued, bored, and angry at the same time. It had great potential, but unfortunately it did not deliver for me at all. 

Thank you to Voracious Readers Only and Andrea Lightfoot for the opportunity to read and review this book.