Michelle Duff

A fascinating if often uneven collection. With some of the stories Duff is clearly operating outside her wheelhouse (and good on her for that) but they just don't work as well as the others. The SF/Spec fic character of collateral feels labored, and the semi-futuristic satire "Spook" is neither as funny nor as hard-hitting as you would hope; it feels like a story with a great premise but where the execution was too timid to commit to either focus. Throughout the entire collection I kept show more feeling there was something missing, but it was hard to put my finger on what that was. Some of the stories were fine and even impactful, but I always felt like there should have been more. Few of them landed with that satisfying crunch where you finish a short story, sit back, and think "wow, that was not only nicely done but couldn't have been done in any other way." One example of that is the title story; I had just been reading about the historical phenomenon of "surplus women" and dove into this, only to feel that it didn't do much beyond making some obvious connections between past and present. When Duff is on point, however, they results are amazing: the opening story "Easy" effortlessly captures the cruelty and confusion of adolescent girls' relationships with one another, and I am still thinking about "Monstera" and in particular "List Day," the latter a fine example of a story that is about so much else than what it appears to be about. Oddly, given what I've said so far, the entire collection does kind of work. The many ways in which our culture still treats women as surplus are on pretty obvious display. But the power of the collection is the way in which Duff repeatedly how women set themselves aside, rendering themselves surplus to their own lives and desires. show less