Review by Booklist Review
Harlan's debut collection of stories showcases characters as they gain knowledge or make realizations that irrevocably disturb their strange worlds. In "Algal Bloom," two young girls coming-of-age dare to swim in a poisonous lake, not realizing the consequences of their actions until later. In "Hunting the Viper King," Dorothy joins her father's hunt for the Viper King, whose fat will give only one of them wisdom of the whole world. In "Take Only What Belongs to You," Esther falls in love with an author while reading her stories and wants to find proof that the author was a lesbian like herself. In "Fiddler, Fool, Pair," Naomi returns to the place under the hill to gamble in a dangerous card game with fairy tale creatures, in which valuable objects, body parts, and memories are all on the table. And in the title story, Geb harvests mushrooms from his lover Agnes' body for the two to eat in peace until a man disrupts their quiet utopia. Harlan's collection is jarring and daringly original, and will keep readers captivated until the end.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
