Jesi Bender’s Child of Light is a masterclass in narrative in-betweens. Bender writes beautiful, evocative prose and descriptions that are both startling and disturbing. The story is both narratively complex with several throughlines, and deceptively simple. The novel follows Ambrétte Memenon, a thirteen-year-old young woman moving with her family to Utica, New York in 1886. Ambrétte herself is imprisoned in a twilight land of “in-betweens.” For instance, her father only speaks French, her mother and brother are bilingual, and she only speaks in English. The book uses the main character’s feelings of being trapped between two words to launch into experimentations with structure, perspective, and language. The form of the book is both a testament to what novels can accomplish and breaks all conventions with a reckless abandon
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Jeff Fleischer’s collection of short stories, Animal Husbandry and Other Fictions, experiments with adding a healthy dose of magic to create a sort of modernized mythos. While not included in every story, the majority weave mysticism, fantasy, or both into otherwise grounded stories—little girls making deals with witches, a king of the cats, and multiple varieties of the classic talking animal. This push to expand the “acceptable” boundaries of magical realism in fiction ultimately allows Fleischer to convey a wider array of narratives that, had he gone an entirely realistic route, likely would have come out rote and structurally similar to many other short fictions.
“The forest wears perfume. You’ve smelled it: sun-baked pine, heady as fresh bread. Forest dresses stout in summer, all kinds of layers. Then she strips naked in winter—the opposite of people. Forest sings and sighs, moans and hums. Voices legion, connected millions: leaves in windblown tremble; gray-brown trunks hushed as soldiers, some kissed by sun, some drowned in shadow; rain whisper and thunderbowl” (32).
It is evident that Darrin Doyle, author of the book Let Gravity Seize the Dead has a deep appreciation for nature. He describes the outdoors with such detail and respect you feel that you are deep in the thick of it. He speaks of it with human-like qualities, as if it were a living, breathing person with a past and feelings. And while these aspects give the book life and beauty, Doyle’s novel also evokes a sense of eeriness that leaves the reader with a chill that is hard to shake even after the words on the page end. This chill gets even more sinister as past and present intertwine and weave a story that transcends beyond time, leaving us encased in these vivid descriptions of nature with the question: “why?”
Most of us are familiar with the concept of the seven deadly sins: gluttony, envy, wrath, lust, sloth, to name a few. Alice Kaltman embraces these sins—along with their virtuous counterparts—in her short story collection, Almost Deadly, Almost Good. She personifies the sins in her complex characters while exploring an equal number of virtues. Her stories depict the tragedies and triumphs of human nature. Characters embodying gluttony, envy, and wrath seem to be in a constant state of inner conflict and turmoil while those who practice kindness, humility, and patience have better outcomes.
While it’s typical for media to display love under rose-colored lenses, The Geography of First Kisses by Karin Cecile Davidson shows the in-betweens of romance. Davidson reveals the love, loss, and nostalgia of relationships through the use of fully realized characters and descriptive language. With each short story, the characters feel close enough to the reader’s heart that it’s easy to trick the brain into thinking the whole book was about them from cover to cover.
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