The pelican child Stories

Review by Booklist Review

Back when she still loved books, Jane Click "preferred the language of displacement and estrangement that prepared a path to revelation over language that simply refreshed and enlarged upon what she already knew." This defines much-lauded fiction writer Williams' modus operandi, which is inspired by her abiding outrage over our ceaseless destruction of the living world. In a dozen intricate, unnerving, caustically funny, and haunting tales, her lonely, displaced, and bewildered characters struggle with painful quandaries in a desiccated world. Appalled by their violent heritage, aging twin heiresses take radical action. In a tiny, desolate desert town, a woman is devastated when she reads about the death of the Great Barrier Reef. A woman desperate to inherit a beach house from her ill father finds that actually "she could no longer bear to watch struggling nature." These grim tales are so ravishingly well-made, so astutely imagined, they evoke as much awe as despair. And in the bravura final story, "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child," a fairy tale involving a revolving house on chicken legs and John James Audubon, redemption is found.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The protagonists of these gorgeous stories from Williams (Concerning the Future of Souls) grapple with mortality and their hold on reality. The sad and darkly funny "Stuff" begins with 60-something Henry mistakenly receiving a terminal diagnosis meant for a much older fellow lung cancer patient, before learning his own cancer is a "bit more advanced" than the other guy's. Henry then works up the courage to tell his mother, who lives in a rest home and is "the one who was supposed to be dying, though she never did." In the wonderfully strange "Nettle," about the fear of growing up, a 21-year-old man claims semi-seriously that he'll end his life before his 22nd birthday, so that he won't reach the age his father was when he was born. "The Beach House," an arch story of disinheritance, follows middle-aged Amber's attempt to dissuade her father from bequeathing the family's vacation home to his dog. Amber commiserates with a friend, who goes on a rant about their parents' generation and the end of inherited wealth, saying, "They're using everything up themselves, or they're giving it to something wacky." Throughout, William grabs the reader's attention with striking dialogue and arresting conceits. This collection is a gift from a master of the form. Agent: Amelia Atlas, CAA. (Nov.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Enigmatic, elegant stories by a writer at the pinnacle of her art. Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken--and occasionally sinister--lies beneath. The interactions of a woman and her driver in the opening story, "Flour," are a case in point: She is well-off, but she invents an excuse to get rid of an expected weekend guest so that she can escape her daily life. The driver "spends the nights searching for the missing word in some Coptic riddle," the woman tells us. That missing word figures in a folktale--Williams being a devotee of the genre--that echoes in the odd events that follow, ending at a destination that, the woman says, "struck me then as being utterly foreign." In another story, a man is told he has cancer, then that he's been confused for another patient but still has cancer. He tells his mother, "According to the doctor, I'm dying," to which she replies, "Oh, well." A talking dog tells an assistant at a writers' retreat, "The river of indifference flows through the country of forgetfulness." The mystical charlatan George Gurdjieff drifts down to Tucson, Arizona, to visit the childhood home of Susan Sontag, whom he adores; never mind that the chronology doesn't line up. An ethereal child, perhaps a ghost, tells a woman, "Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop." All the stories here are lovely, and so skillfully written that disbelief is suspended forthwith. But the pièce de résistance is "Baba Iaga & The Pelican Child," where the Slavic folkloric figure meets the murderous naturalist John James Audubon, much to the detriment of her pelican daughter, a searing fable of the destruction of nature and the ease with which humans do harm. Superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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