Green Frog: Stories

This book is just fantastic. I read a lot of short story collections and I like most of them, but this one astonished me. There's a story narrated by a praying mantis and a story narrated by a kumiho, a creature from Korean folktales that appears as fox with many tails or as a beautiful woman. There's a story told from the point of view of a group of middle-aged church ladies and stories told in the second person. And there are stories that are about ordinary women and girls, usually Korean-American, just trying to figure things out. It's a stellar collection that deserves to be widely read.

In a Nutshell: An astounding collection of speculative fiction with some diverse female characters. Infused with a strong Korean flavour, but with situations and emotions that are universal. A fabulous OwnVoices option for short story lovers, especially those with a fondness for speculative fiction.

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This collection of fifteen stories comes with no author’s note. However, the blurb helps us know that this collection of “offbeat, scintillating stories influenced by Korean fairy tales and contemporary ennui, shines a light on womanhood in all of its human (and other) forms.” An intriguing and ambitious theme, met almost perfectly by the stories, which come from varied genres such as speculative fiction, show more contemporary drama, fantasy, folk lore, and sci-fi.

The author’s imagination is powerful, as is her exploration of emotions. There’s a sense of poignancy underlying most of the stories, though not all the tales are morose. Each of the narratives covers a tangled relationship.

What makes the stories distinct is the approach and the main character. The narrator in the tales covers a diverse spectrum of females, such as a twelve-year-old girl, a mother, a daughter, a kumiho, and even a female praying mantis. The narrative styles are also distinct, with the tales being explored in first person singular, first person plural, second person and third person. Each story felt so fresh and so individual that I never felt any kind of déjà vu while going through this work.

Quite often, an anthology/story collection begins quite strong and then starts getting either dragged or repetitive. This time though, the start of the book was relatively okay for me, partly because of the ‘slice of life’ storytelling style. As I began to wonder if this book would take a nosedive, the stories took a strong turn upwards, and stayed there right till the end. I am so glad I persisted, because this ended up being one of the most creative anthologies I have read this year.

The endings are mostly satisfying, but more importantly, they make perfect sense for their respective storylines without feeling forced. Only a couple of the endings felt abrupt to me.

As always, I rated the stories individually, Of the fifteen stories, a whopping eleven stories reached or crossed the 4 star mark. The remaining four stories scored 3.5 stars. What a performance!

As I don’t want to pen a lengthy list of top rankers, here are my favourites, with 4.5 stars:

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I really enjoyed this set of short stories. They all have a sense of being an outsider or of the "other". The story narrated by the praying mantis is really inventive. Some of them dip into a Korean folk past, the one about the kumiho, the shape shifting creature that appears as a fox with 9 tails or a human, being the most clearly in this vein. The pair taking a future technology were very good and not entirely far-fetched. An AI doll of a loved one can surely only be a short distance away, but the implications for one couple are explored. Is that a help or a hindrance in the processing of grief?
There is a strong sense of parental expectation in a number of these stories and the protagonists are often trying to find a life that is show more their own. It's a very sicessful set of stories. show less