Publishers Weekly
★ 11/11/2019
Sparks (The Unfinished World) impresses with her exceptional collection of wry, feminist stories. “A Place for Hiding Precious Things” is an incendiary retelling of the fairy tale “Donkeyskin” that features a young princess’s escape into contemporary Manhattan from her father’s incestuous desires. A high school girl with a pitch-perfect teen voice lives with her dysfunctional family in a trailer park in “Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park” and is bored with the “weird pioneer girl” that haunts her until the ghost proves herself useful with homework and warding off sexual advances. Climate change and societal collapse set the stage for a woman’s ex-husband’s transformation into a religious despot who builds a giant tower in “We Destroy the Moon.” Some stories smuggle incredible emotional impact into surprisingly few pages, including the haunting, unexplained severing of a friendship in “Mildly Unhappy with Moments of Joy” and a queen who attempts to outrace a rapidly approaching future through a strange form of time-travel in “Is the Future a Nice Place for Girls.” The time management–obsessed father in “The Eyes of Saint Lucy” foists his mistress’s baby on his wife and daughter, leading to a chilling, macabre twist. Sparks’s sardonic wit never distracts from her polished dismantling of everyday and extraordinary abuses. Readers will love this remarkable, deliciously caustic collection. (Feb.)
Clare Beams
"And I Do Not Forgive You is so cracklingly alive it singes your fingertips. These stories are fiercely funny, heartrending, enraged and enraging, redemptive—in short, essential. They’re also some of the most inventive stories I’ve read. I loved every one."
Carmen Maria Machado
"Amber Sparks’ stories are, precisely, like her name: precious things delivered in a burst of fire and light."
Aimee Bender
"What joyful play and heart and movement in these stories, full of permission and the thrum of ideas bursting and growing on the page. To read one is like a bon-bon on a silver platter with a lit sparkler stuck inside."
Lindsay Hunter
"In this genre-bending new collection, Amber Sparks has once again shown herself to be fearless and cutting, the insistent voice that breaks through the hand trying to silence it. I had a lot of fun reading these fresh, sharp, delicious stories, even as my neck prickled with doom."
Ling Ma
"Re-appropriating fairy tales, urban legends, and supernatural fantasies, Amber Sparks' startling kaleidoscopic visions re-cast familiar heroines in their own stories. Reading this was a delight!"
Janet St. John
"Few readers will encounter with any frequency such bold, bizarre, and brutally honest content as is in Sparks’ (The Unfinished World and Other Stories, 2016) new collection.... Sparks’ imagination seems limitless, her approaches to style and form without boundaries. Yet there is a cohesive voice and intention here, whether Sparks is using the vehicles of myth, history, and fantasy in her attempts to unravel rather than weave together tales of women’s true experiences. To escape possession, find one's self, exert force without shame or justification, and tell what really happened—these themes rise like foam on the roiling bone-rich broth of righteous feminine rage. At once timely, wickedly funny, and uncomfortably real, Sparks’ singular stories have the power to shake us wide awake and shatter every last happily-ever-after illusion."
Library Journal
12/01/2019
Irreverent and clever characters take center stage in Sparks's latest collection (May We Shed These Human Bodies). The pieces here are beyond the classification of any one genre, borrowing from fairy tales, fantasy, coming-of-age, modern life, and social commentary. In "Everyone's a Winner at Meadow Park," a teenage girl navigates life in a suburban trailer park, while haunted by the ghost of a boring pioneer girl. In "Is the Future a Nice Place for Girls," an ominous and anarchic future threatens a castle. "Our Geographic History" chronicles the demise of a relationship through Midwestern cities and existential locations. Zeus is a stereotypical modern dad in the sketch "In Which Athena Designs a Video Game with the Express Purpose of Trolling her Father." In "When the Husband Grew Wings," a dull husband grows wings after his wife sprinkles a mysterious powder on his cornflakes. Does he notice? VERDICT Each story is vivid, unexpected, and satisfyingly weird. Darkly comic and whip-smart, this collection is recommended for readers of Aimee Bender and Alexandra Kleeman.—Emily Hamstra, Seattle
Kirkus Reviews
2019-11-10
Bite-sized fiction about the lives of women, from the far past to the present and beyond, who have been wronged.
The characters in this third collection of short fiction from Sparks (The Unfinished World and Other Stories, 2016, etc.) exemplify the famous quote from Muriel Rukeyser that made the social media rounds in the wake of the #MeToo movement: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open." These are stories of that split-open world. In "Everyone's a Winner in Meadow Park"—an uncharacteristically lengthy story for Sparks—a young girl living in a trailer park is haunted by the ghost of another young girl, who helps her navigate the turmoil of her hardscrabble environment. The daughter of an artist obsessed with making dioramas of female saints tells the story of her strange childhood and her stepfather's murder at the hands of her mother ("The Eyes of Saint Lucy"). Many of Sparks' pieces borrow from myths and fairy tales; in "A Place for Hiding Precious Things," a young princess is transported by her fairy godmother to contemporary New York City to save her from a ghoulish fate. In "When the Husband Grew Wings," a wife who adds a magic powder to her husband's cereal that results in his growing wings is unhappy with the results. Although there is anger and rage in these stories, Sparks suffuses them with zingy humor at every opportunity. At their best, they balance heartbreak and wit. The pieces that don't land are the ones where that wit grows cartoonish, such as the apocalyptic "We Destroy the Moon," in which a cult leader's wife persistently hashtags her own narration.
A collection with a goth heart beating beneath a cheerleader's peppy exterior.
