Publishers Weekly
04/04/2022
In Harlan’s enticing debut collection, primarily queer, female characters encounter surreal and fantastical situations. In the title story, the protagonist’s lover becomes mysteriously mycological, sprouting various types of mushrooms the partners can cook and enjoy—or use to poison an unwitting, uninvited guest. In the tense “The Changeling,” two cousins kidnap the main character’s aunt’s hard-won “miracle baby,” fearing he is a demonic doppelgänger. “Endangered Animals” involves a road trip with two young women who share ambiguous and unpredictable feelings for each other. The story is set against a backdrop of the effects of climate change, and it offers a surprising twist. In another standout, “Is This You?,” Maura is visited by versions of her former selves at various ages as her mother writes about Maura’s life, including a period of self-harm during Maura’s adolescence. Harlan’s prose is beautiful and vivid, and each story has elements of beauty and horror, evocative of, as the narrator of “Algal Bloom” puts it, “nothing I had words for, like the end of the world.” As that story’s protagonist defies the warnings against swimming in a potentially lethal pond, Harlan captures the essence of the collection: much splendor and quite a bit of squirm. This is well worth diving into. (June)
Jessamine Chan
"A debut of astonishing range and beauty, nimble and magical and profound. In stunning prose, Kathryn Harlan’s wildly imaginative and daring stories reveal the anguish of growing up in a dying world. Her characters’ quest for knowledge—about themselves, their families, their bodies, and their yearnings—will thrill and haunt you."
Kirstin Valdez Quade
"These excellent stories are insightful, transporting, and gloriously uncanny. In story after story, Fruiting Bodies uncovers knowledge that is tantalizing and terrible."
New York Times - Yoon Choi
"The fruiting bodies in this collection are at once figurative and disturbingly literal… as though speaking to all of the women in this collection, [one character] asks, ‘Are you sure your version is the right version?’"
Vulture - Mary Retta
"The worlds Harlan creates feel both expansively fantastical and palpably real. A stunning literary portrayal of the climate apocalypse, Fruiting Bodies provides a window into how we can make life out of decay."
CJ Hauser
"Fruiting Bodies is abundant with dark and tender wonders. In the spirit of Shirley Jackson, Kathryn Harlan coaxes their characters’ secret feelings into the open, where they bloom into compelling dramas. A book as loving as it is eerie, full of queer love and queer longing, I so enjoyed my stay in the deep woods of Harlan’s imagination."
Literary Hub - Eliza Smith
"Tales of women and girls with a touch of the supernatural and strange, engaging with our (very strange, sometimes supernatural) world…[In "Algal Bloom,"] Harlan managed to make me feel, like the narrator, on the edge of thirteen…I’ll be eating this one up slowly, bite by bite."
Judith Claire Mitchell
"Allow me to tell the unvarnished truth: Fruiting Bodies is going to knock your socks off. Put on your socks right now and get prepared. Kathryn Harlan’s writing is just what you’re looking for, but something you’ve never seen before."
Amber Sparks
"Oh my gosh Kathryn Harlan’s stories are so good—they’re feral and formal and funny and exactly what you want when you turn to a person you love and say ‘tell me a story.’"
Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen
"This is an extraordinary, gorgeous, wildly imaginative collection of stories. I know I will be returning to them again and again."
Kirkus Reviews
2022-03-25
A debut collection that mingles the magical and uncanny with signs of global warning.
These coming-of-age stories about young women are sometimes set against a backdrop of climate change, sometimes in altered magical worlds. Because we live in an age in which rising temperatures and raging wildfires, significant loss of biodiversity, and monster storms worry the line between what used to seem impossible and our new reality, this mix of genres is potent. In “Endangered Animals,” the disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park are both a destination for a young woman and her ex-girlfriend on a road trip together and the perfect metaphor for the painful thaw of their dying affection. In “Algal Bloom,” a lake poisoned by algae during an uncharacteristically hot summer is a temptation for the slightly rebellious almost 13-year-old narrator and her best friend while also capturing the murkiness of the narrator’s desires—the peril of feelings she’s not quite old enough to name. Elsewhere, in “Fruiting Bodies,” a woman sprouts mushrooms from her body, which her lover gently harvests and cooks into elaborate meals, an act both nurturing and parasitic—and almost possible in some dystopic future. Harlan crafts gorgeous prose; in her hands, even the dirty work of maggots, using “their hooked mouths to spoon up the body’s liquids,” becomes something beautiful. Her stories twist away from expected endings—as in “Hunting the Viper-King,” in which the narrator’s father’s hunt for a mythical snake both is and isn’t as crazy as it seems—and offer nuanced emotional insights. A few stories miss the mark when the magic fails to become emotionally resonant (“Is This You?”) or the characters feel thin, like ideas in service to inventive plots (“Fiddler, Fool Pair”).
Original, deftly told stories that chart coming-of-age in perilous times for our planet.
