A review by readthesparrow
Weird Black Girls: Stories by Elwin Cotman

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This review is based on a digital ARC provided by the publisher.

REVIEW

Weird Black Girls is going to be strange to review. Do I think it was good? Yeah. I mean, I rated it four stars.

Was it what I expected based on the title, cover, and blurb? Not really. The two contemporary stories felt out of place and the focus of the collection wasn’t really on weird Black girls. More on that later.

For now, a brief summary and discussion of each story:

THE SWITCHIN’ TREE - A Black community is faced with an authoritarian tree that progressively escalates the violence parents visit on their children. This was a remarkably strong start to the collection; I loved the main character (a tomboyish young Black girl), the prose (a little purple at times, but sue me, I liked it), and the bizarre, weird horror that came screaming in at the end. 

REUNION - Two friends catch up about their lives while reality shifts around them. “The Switchin’ Tree” is hard to follow up and while I enjoyed the absurd, strange imagery of “Reunion,” the characters fell flat for me.

OWEN - A father deals with his son’s obsessional grief over the death of a wrestler. The first of the two more contemporary, less fantastical stories. I enjoyed it! The image ||of a father taking his son to the woods to hold a shoe box funeral for a stranger is deeply touching and an image that|| will stick with me for a while.

TRIGGERED - Two toxic friends in an activist community are shitty to each other and everyone around them. The second contemporary story. It’s… fine. Sharp commentary on the ways that identity and activism get weaponized by toxic people and some excellent character work, but the pacing dragged (it’s 50 pages long). I just really wanted it to be over.

THINGS I NEVER LEARNED IN CAITLIN CLARKE’S INTRO TO ACTING CLASS - Two Black men in a relationship discover one can relive the other’s memories from undergrad when they touch. Back to spec fic. This was one of my favorites in the collection–the desperate need for human connection and the desire to be desired and the question of “what if things were different” hit hard.

TOURNAMENT ARC - Two older Black men decide to run a LARP fight at a con, only for multi-versal, cosmic, fantastical entrants to start showing up. A hilarious, sweet, nostalgic reflection on fan culture, anime, and how they can be a haven for Black kids trying to figure themselves out. My stand-out favorite of the collection and the one I’ll still be thinking about in a year.

WEIRD BLACK GIRLS - In an alternate universe where Boston was hit by the Rupture, an upheaval of the earth that thrust the city into the air and lead to a blooming of the bizarre and fantastical, a man and his younger ex-girlfriend take one last trip together. The titular story, quite long at 100 pages. While I loved the setting, I couldn’t stand the narrator and spent the whole time wishing the POV was from his ex’s point of view.

In a way, Weird Black Girls reminds me of The King in Yellow. The weird, magical, literary stories rule, while the contemporary stories feel out of place and aren’t as enjoyable. 

As mentioned, I liked “Owen.” I feel “Triggered” is fine, even though it’s not my cup of tea. Both are worth a read, but I think they’d have been more enjoyable if I’d gone into them expecting contemporary rather than more weird fantastical spec-fic set up by everything surrounding them. Good stories, just not sure why they’re featured in a collection described as “literary-fantastical hybrid fiction,” y’know?

If you want a collection with weird Black girls, I’d point you elsewhere (for example, to All These Sunken Souls, which has a lot of fantastic short stories about weird Black girls and young women).  Despite being titled Weird Black Girls, I’d argue the collection has a far heavier focus on Black men, with Black girls and women almost always being secondary characters. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

This collection is certainly worth picking up, purely for “Things I Never Learned in Caitlin Clarke’s Intro to Acting Class” and “Tournament Arc.” If you like not-very-short stories, “Weird Black Girls,” the titular and final story, is almost 100 pages, while “Triggered,” the second-longest, is 50 pages. While some are indeed on the shorter end (“Reunion” at 23 pages, “Owen” at 21 pages), most of these are the long kind of story. I look forward to reading more Cotman in the future!

Thank you to Scribner for providing a digital ARC via Netgalley. 
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