Review by Booklist Review
The concreteness of Bender's language is in sharp contrast to the deep strangeness and troubling ambiguity afoot in the dystopian worlds her characters must navigate. A short-story writer of disconcerting visions and virtuoso skills, Bender follows The New Order (2018) with a speculative collection that aligns the decimation of climate change and tyrannical regimes with the precarity of friendship and the bewilderment and longing of parents and children. The title story dramatizes the emotional consequences of brutal intrusions into women's decisions about pregnancy. In "Separation," a bond evolves between two schoolgirls from families of different social classes as the elite prepare to abandon the dying planet for Mars. In "Globes," a couple are separated from their son when people are abruptly shoved into glass spheres and launched into orbit as deadly plumes rise from the earth. COVID-19 and dementia burden a well-intended family; people's body parts become invisible as they seek justice for aggressions that don't qualify as crimes; a new patient puts a psychiatrist struggling with a mysterious malady and missing his distant son in danger. Bender's finely calibrated prose makes the most bizarre situations feel plausible and the most ordinary predicaments seem uncanny, while her psychological insights into marriage, parenting, guilt, memory, age, and loss are poignantly precise. These are many-faceted, deeply ponderable stories.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bender's impressive latest (after The New Order) explores relationships between friends and family with a mix of speculative and realist tales. The narrator of "The Words of Dr. L" lives in a dystopian future where pregnant women are required by law to become mothers. She hopes to end her pregnancy, breaking from her best friend Joanne, who joins a group called Protection, established to shield women's fetuses from their "untoward thoughts." In the unsettling and dreamlike "The Extra Child," a couple drops off their youngest child at college, only to return home and find another child who "looked to be about ten" and claims to be theirs ("Suddenly, I knew it," the mother thinks. "I had given birth to him, clearly in some sort of haze, and then I had forgotten him"). The most moving story, "Arlene Is Dead," follows a family who care for their elderly relative Sylvia while weathering the Covid pandemic. In the monotony of quarantine, they become delighted by how animated Sylvia becomes when ranting about a self-absorbed friend. Bender's more fantastical stories recall the work of Isaac Asimov, while her realist takes offer insight into the complex lives of characters navigating loss and disappointment. It's an accomplished collection from a seasoned storyteller. Agent: Maria Massie, Massie & McQuilken. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of stories that artfully reframe issues including parenting, aging, illness, and life during the Covid-19 pandemic. "He hypnotized me, and I loved him": That's the beginning of "The Hypnotist," a story about the narrator's lifelong connection with her father. "The hypnosis depended on a sort of innocence, a bargain between parent and child." As if turning a shirt inside-out and finding a beautiful new pattern, Bender--a National Book Award finalist for her story collectionRefund (2015)--does a brilliant job of discovering novel metaphors and creating futuristic plots to re-examine some of life's most taken-for-granted relationships and situations. In "The Listener," one of the collection's standouts, a therapist named Saul suffers from a mysterious illness (perhaps chronic fatigue syndrome) that saps all his energy. Bender finds the perfect way to show how Saul's invisible illness feels by having him kidnapped at gunpoint by a man pretending to be a new patient. At the bank, where his captor has taken him to withdraw money, now posing as his son, no one can see what's happening: "What did it take for someone to see another?" he wonders, a question that cuts right to the heart of how well anyone can truly know other people. Other stories are incisive allegories for our age. In "The Shame Exchange," which won a Pushcart Prize, elected officials who have no shame take on the shame of ordinary people selected by a lottery, with the idea that they might begin to "govern with sensitivity and in a kindly way," while in "The Court of the Invisible," people begin disappearing because of the cruelty of everyday life. Not a lot happens in many of these stories; sometimes that feels like the point, as in "Data" and "Arlene Is Dead," two tales that capture the disorienting claustrophobia of the pandemic, though other pieces might have been trimmed without losing anything. Highly original stories that speak to the challenges of being human in the 21st century. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
