I really love this review of my new collection. It just went live at PANK–a journal I also love. The review is (blushingly) laudatory, but also tough, respectful, and fair. My very favorite kind of review. Thank you, Carmen Maria Machado! If we ever meet in person, the drinks are on me.
Here’s a beautifully written excerpt:
“The linked stories in Bones progress in rough, but not exact chronological order, from the late 19th century to an unspecified dystopian future, telling first the story of a shipwrecked sea captain’s wife, and, last, that of a prisoner of a cult on a floating island. In between, we learn the intimate details of the lives of the many people that link them to one another across the intervening centuries. These bookending stories mirror each other, both following a woman lost among many, from whom love has been snatched away.
The collection is richly detailed and atmospheric: a pleasurable amalgamation of bodies and breath, water and sand, the burning heat of a mushroom cloud. The solid backbone running through the entire work is one of science (biology, anthropology, ecology, oceanic studies, and everything in between), reminiscent of the work of Andrea Barrett, who also explores the intersection of the sciences and women’s lives. The stories vacillate in location, clustering mostly in the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic around southernmost Florida, but all take place somewhere where land—or something approximating it—touches sea.”