The New York Times Book Review - Rachel Syme
Sparks's stylish second collection is the work of a young writer whose voice feels far wiser than her years, as she engages with ancient themes: the Greek myths, the rituals of death, the small tokens that lovers trade over a lifetime of experience. Sparks has no fidelity to realism; she plays with both fantasy and form. No one story sounds like another, yet her singular voice floats through the collection, tying it together with opulent prose that draws heavily on history and the macabre.
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/30/2015
The images tumbling from Sparks’s mind in her extraordinary second story collection (following May We Shed These Human Bodies) are fantastical and sublime, whether she is unveiling the secret life of a janitor working in a space station, exposing the heart of darkness in a twin who is set on revenge, or—as in the title novella—pairing two lovers in the 1920s who have widely diverging backgrounds. In present-day, historical, and fantasy settings, the author is assured; her spare but colorful prose takes the reader on journeys of longing and mystery, often into uncharted territory, all the while capturing setting and character in a few words—“Teesa is one of those people who substitute scarves for personality.” As Sparks explores the glory of a daughter killing a werewolf in “Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter,” the tenderness of the man who builds “death houses” in “For These Humans Who Cannot Fly,” or the obsession of a time traveler in “Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting,” the breadth of her imagination never ceases to amaze. (Jan.)
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Lauren LeBlanc
"Fabulist authors such as Lauren Groff, Kelly Link, Karen Russell and Margaret Atwood examine monumental family sagas and twisted love affairs through [mythology and fairy tales] because these universal stories demand the profound gravity that emerges only from a distorted sense of reality. Amber Sparks' crackling, dark clutch of sharply focused short stories falls into this canon. . . . Forged in an evocative and sensual fire, these tales transcend tradition to shine new light onto timeless complications."
Roxane Gay
"In The Unfinished World and Other Stories, Amber Sparks is a master of the fantastic. Here are stories about fever librarians and brothers who are swans, time travelers and space janitors. With each story, Sparks defies the known world in absolutely thrilling ways."
Nancy Hightower
"Amber Sparks uses the surreal and fantastic in stunning, surprising ways. Like Carola Dibbell's The Only Ones and Emily Mandel's Station Eleven, the book is a masterful work of speculative fiction."
Bookforum - John Domini
"Fascinating in its serendipity, yet alert to pangs of the ordinary, The Unfinished World…[is] lovely, brave."
Elle - Keziah Weir
"Amber Sparks's The Unfinished World and Other Stories has all the furnishings of a twenty-first century homage to the carnally macabre Angela Carter. The collection captures an off-kilter universe of almost-fairy tales with equal parts beauty and melancholy."
Rachel Syme
"Sparks's stylish second collection is the work of a young writer whose voice feels far wiser than her years…[S]he plays with both fantasy and form. No one story sounds like another, yet her singular voice floats through the collection, tying it together with opulent prose that draws heavily on history and the macabre."
Laura van den Berg
"Amber Sparks is one of my favorite writers working today. Her stories are brutal beauties, guaranteed to explode your brain and steal your heart, and The Unfinished World and Other Stories is vintage Sparks: endlessly inventive, thrillingly imaginative, utterly assured. I loved this wild miracle of a collection."
Kirkus Reviews
2015-11-03
A collection of elliptical stories in which death throws a long shadow over an eclectic group of characters. There's a man who builds houses for the dead in case they come back to life, a taxidermist who learned her art from her late father, and two fossil hunters in a love triangle. The 19 stories in Sparks' second collection (May We Shed These Human Bodies, 2012) are shot through with fabulist elements and are rarely more than a few pages long, making them read like fairy tales or prose poems. And as with poetry, the strength of the collection is Sparks' lush, lyrical writing, saturating the dark, death-filled stories with beauty. Many of the stories, in fact, feature characters trying to find solace—either through love or through art—in the face of loss. In "The Fires of Western Heaven," about the aftermath of war, the anonymous first-person plural narrator admits, "We write, we sing, we paint, and still the blackness follows, still the dead are there in every note, every brushstroke." In the collection's title piece (which, at novella length, is the book's longest, by far), Set, a young man who has always felt like half a ghost after a childhood bear attack, crosses paths with Inge, whose family and home have been decimated by tragedy. Sparks interweaves Inge's and Set's histories together with descriptions of items from Set's dead brother's "Cabinet of Curiosities," a collection of mysterious items—extinct birds' eggs, burned baby teeth—that haunts Set. Sparks' stories, too, function much like the curiosities in the cabinet: finely wrought, strange, and sometimes inscrutable. When Inge wonders, "Was the world crowded with ghosts?" the collection answers for her: yes. Luckily for readers, we have Sparks to guide us through the underworld. Stylish and deeply imagined.
