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A review by octavia_cade
Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
5.0
I absolutely loved McKay's earlier novel, The Animals in that Country, so when I heard from her that she had a short story collection coming out soon, I knew I had to read it. So glad I did! Not all of the stories here are speculative, and one of my favourite general pieces revolves around organising smoko break in a supermarket, but they're all this uneasy, often bleak contemporary view of mostly-Australia. Some of them, like the cat farm story, make me flinch a little to read, but like Animals these stories aren't meant to be comfortable reading.
On balance, without the title story, I might have given this four stars. "Gunflower," however. Let me tell you about "Gunflower." It's freaking outstanding, and all I could think when I read it was "I wish I'd written this!" It's a not-Australia story, as sometime off the coast of near-future America, an abortion ship waits, in international waters, to provide services to women after their awful government fails them yet again. Joan, newly pregnant and not at all happy about it, has other options available to her but chooses what's essentially the "abortion without borders" ship, hoping to be able to share her experiences with other women afterwards. Everything seems to be going well, until the story takes a weird turn into the speculative, and it's so ambiguous, and so absent of conclusion, that the whole thing is just fascinating. I love it.
It's one of those stories I'm going to end up reading over and over again, I know it.
On balance, without the title story, I might have given this four stars. "Gunflower," however. Let me tell you about "Gunflower." It's freaking outstanding, and all I could think when I read it was "I wish I'd written this!" It's a not-Australia story, as sometime off the coast of near-future America, an abortion ship waits, in international waters, to provide services to women after their awful government fails them yet again. Joan, newly pregnant and not at all happy about it, has other options available to her but chooses what's essentially the "abortion without borders" ship, hoping to be able to share her experiences with other women afterwards. Everything seems to be going well, until the story takes a weird turn into the speculative, and it's so ambiguous, and so absent of conclusion, that the whole thing is just fascinating. I love it.
It's one of those stories I'm going to end up reading over and over again, I know it.