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Sep. 22nd, 2018 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI've read several of sovay's short stories in various places around the web, but reading them collected is a significantly more intense and immersive experience. While none of the stories in Forget the Sleepless Shores are directly related to each other per se, recurring themes ripple through them: ghosts, gods, and monsters, often not mutually exclusive; shores and bogs and other liminal watery spaces; endings and metamorphoses, generally triggered by the seduction of myths and the past.
(It is worth mentioning that they are also often very Jewish and very queer.)
A couple of my favorites from the collection, in no particular order:
The Dybbuk in Love: a woman is haunted by a turn-of-the-century Jewish intellectual (obviously this is my entire jam)
The Salt House: a man who lost his wife to the sea has a father-daughter day by the beach with his weird ocean child
The Creeping Influences: the one about gender and murder and bog bodies (for the record, no one ACTUALLY bangs a bog body) (except in their subconscious)
When Can A Broken Glass Mend?: a seven-year-old girl plays a game of marriage with another little girl, who is a demon; later, repercussions, by which I mean romance
On Two Streets With Three Languages: an homage to An-sky
All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts: cousins commiserate over the fact that, unlike the rest of their Innsmouth family, they are never going to turn into immortal sea monsters and go down to the bottom of the ocean
The Trinitite Golem: Oppenheimer's golem asks to be unmade; made me feel a lot of things about Jewish scientists and the development of the atom bomb, maybe my favorite story in the book
Many of the stories are set in Boston, but it's a Boston that feels really unfamiliar to me in the best possible way -- Sonya's prose always pulls out the eerie and the numinous in a way that my own eyes just don't.
Standard review disclaimer: Sonya Taaffe is a friend, my friends are talented and you should read their books!
sovay's short stories in various places around the web, but reading them collected is a significantly more intense and immersive experience. While none of the stories in Forget the Sleepless Shores are directly related to each other per se, recurring themes ripple through them: ghosts, gods, and monsters, often not mutually exclusive; shores and bogs and other liminal watery spaces; endings and metamorphoses, generally triggered by the seduction of myths and the past. (It is worth mentioning that they are also often very Jewish and very queer.)
A couple of my favorites from the collection, in no particular order:
The Dybbuk in Love: a woman is haunted by a turn-of-the-century Jewish intellectual (obviously this is my entire jam)
The Salt House: a man who lost his wife to the sea has a father-daughter day by the beach with his weird ocean child
The Creeping Influences: the one about gender and murder and bog bodies (for the record, no one ACTUALLY bangs a bog body) (except in their subconscious)
When Can A Broken Glass Mend?: a seven-year-old girl plays a game of marriage with another little girl, who is a demon; later, repercussions, by which I mean romance
On Two Streets With Three Languages: an homage to An-sky
All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts: cousins commiserate over the fact that, unlike the rest of their Innsmouth family, they are never going to turn into immortal sea monsters and go down to the bottom of the ocean
The Trinitite Golem: Oppenheimer's golem asks to be unmade; made me feel a lot of things about Jewish scientists and the development of the atom bomb, maybe my favorite story in the book
Many of the stories are set in Boston, but it's a Boston that feels really unfamiliar to me in the best possible way -- Sonya's prose always pulls out the eerie and the numinous in a way that my own eyes just don't.
Standard review disclaimer: Sonya Taaffe is a friend, my friends are talented and you should read their books!
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Date: 2018-09-24 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 04:09 am (UTC)Me too, honestly.