Chris Nakashima-Brown

In the tradition of the Fantastic and magical realism, this short story collection presents a collection of primarily new voices that deliver fresh, haunting stories. They're not what a Western reader would recognize immediately as Horror or SFF--rather, they're closer to 'weird fiction' or 'magical realism' and bring to mind such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Often quiet and unassuming (until they are not), the stories offer up a Mexico and a literature that is as gorgeous and deep as it is unfamiliar. In most of the stories, the prose is luscious and careful, whether in the flash fiction or the longer stories, and the collection has introduced me to a number of names that I can't wait to look up.

Absolutely recommended.… (more)

In a near-future alternative America, the country had turned into an authoritative state with drones and a government monitoring and controlling everything and everyone. When the novel starts, it appears that it is a future America as it is now but the clues keep adding up - some small and easy to miss, other much bigger (if nothing else clues you in, the assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 will get your attention when it is mentioned). It is an alternative history without getting too away from where we are - some things happened different but the main storyline survived thus allowing current politics and trends to still be valid and in play - with a bit of a twist. Nothing extremely bad happened - but the small changes tipped the country in one too many wars, added more stress to the internal issues and tipped the whole country into something new.

The novel alternates between two viewpoints - Sig, a young teenager who does what he needs to so he can keep alive, and Tania, a government employee with somewhat unorthodox connections who is asked to track him down due to her past connection with him - Sig used to live with her family for awhile so she considers him a brother. The story can get almost choppy at parts - the chapters are usually very short and you get yanked out from the story just when it starts picking up. On the other hand that structure mirrors the fractured country so it actually makes sense. Their meeting is inevitable, Tania's reluctance to work inside of the system she belongs to is obvious from the start so there is never even a hint of this novel not going where it is going.

At the heart of the novel is a rebellion - Americans finally trying to get back the freedom which was lost in the last decades. The country is bleak and it is not just the political system that had changed - the changes had allowed the devastation of the land as well, leaving only pockets of people and land that looks almost normal. We learn what happened slowly - sometimes with a character explaining it, sometimes just with a hint and sometimes just because some of the story parallels ours and you can draw your own conclusions (sometimes wrongly).

It is not an easy novel to read - between the story itself and the style, it can get almost tedious in places and especially towards the middle it feels like a slog. But then again, that mirrors the history it is being shown to us and as such it is logical. The lack of exact time markers for most of the story can add to the confusion but they can be worked out from the story and their lack is intentional - time moves differently depending on what you are doing and history is written in larger increments.

Even if you do not like the style, the story should make you think. Just because our history was a bit different does not mean that we cannot end up in similar situations. Plus seeing the collapse not because nature or a war devastated the country but because history led to it almost naturally is a bit scary. Even scarier when you realize how little it can take for history to go that way. Or how easy is for some of it to happen.

The author refuses to really give America a happy ending - it would not belong in the novel. But through the novel there is hope - and that will need to be enough.… (more)