“𝔸 𝕔𝕠𝕝𝕝𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕨𝕚𝕥𝕙 𝕒 𝕘𝕠𝕥𝕙 𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕥 𝕓𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕓𝕖𝕟𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙 𝕒 𝕔𝕙𝕖𝕖𝕣𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕣’𝕤 𝕡𝕖𝕡𝕡𝕪 𝕖𝕩𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕠𝕣.” - 𝕂𝕚𝕣𝕜𝕦𝕤 ℝ𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕖𝕨𝕤

I always thought that short stories weren't my thing but it turns out I was just reading bad ones. This collection gets a full five stars and makes me believe that I can love short stories.

AND I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU | AMBER SPARKS

SYNOPSIS: Exciting fans of such writers as Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Carmen Maria Machado with prose that shimmers and stings, Amber Sparks holds a singular role in the canon of the weird. Now, she reaches new, uncanny heights with And I Do Not Forgive You. In “Mildly Happy, With Moments of Joy,” a friend is ghosted by a simple text message; in “Everyone’s a Winner at Meadow Park,” a teen precariously coming of age in a trailer park befriends an actual ghost. At once humorous and unapologetically fierce, these stories shine an interrogating light on the adage that “history likes to lie about women”— as the subjects of “A Short and Speculative History of Lavoisier’s Wife” and “You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women” (it’s true, you won’t) will attest. Blending fairy tales and myths with apocalyptic technologies, all tethered intricately by shades of rage, And I Do Not Forgive You offers a mosaic of an all-too-real world that fails to listen to its silenced goddesses.

#deweyrating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I received a complimentary copy of this title from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed are my own.

I'd gotten to really enjoy short story collections, especially from collected authors. But this one was disappointing. The stories were very short--almost too short to really tell a story. And they lacked the animosity and revenge element the cover and description implied.

While this wasn't exactly my own cup of tea, I think our patrons will enjoy it. I'll be adding a copy or two to the collection. Thank you so much for the opportunity to read it early.

An interesting and strange set of fairytales, And I Do Not Forgive You is a pleasure to read. Amber Sparks’ collection of fables with a feminist bent screams and whispers, scares and fascinates and delights, inspires rage and also pride. My favorite stories were Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park, Mildly Happy, with Moments of Joy, and The Eyes of Saint Lucy. And I Do Not Forgive You is full of clever characters and irreverent humor and I plan to recommend it to a lot of my female friends. It is a feminist balm to soothe the part inside of us that is always silently screaming. Thank you @netgalley and Liverlight Publishing for the advance copy in exchange this honest review.

'What kind of tragedy is this? It’s not grand and operatic at all; it’s just awful, just like all the other awful hurts that happen to people like us.'

Would I call this latest collection of stories a release of female rage? No, but they certainly bite and then wink and nod, nudge nudge- get a load of this! How do we still manage to find humor in the horror of it? Well, it’s what keeps us sane. History remembers men and all their greatness, “allowing” for women to live only in their shadow as a helpmate. Nothing proves this more than A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier’s Wife. It tells the story of how ‘wifey’ secured her dead husband’s place in history, despite the threats, the terror of revolutionaries. In Marie’s day there wasn’t band of sisterhood behind you to charge forward in support of your brave fights. None of that for our Marie-Anne Pierrette. Speaking up, shaking cages could cost you your head, but she would not be cowed! This little woman, little scholar, little child bride, little “wifey” meant to be nothing more than erased by history is given some attention as Sparks digs up the bones of her past.

Ghosts are anything but romantic in Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park. For a young girl, who senses this ethereal being “like a shadow over the sun”, the ghost is more witness to her miserable existence than any sort of help. This is the place her own mother’s dreams came to die and where it’s dangerous to be a girl. A place where life is nothing but tragic and it seems impossible to scrape a grain of a dream in the dirt.

Love as sacrifice in We Destroy the Moon, because the lost, the hopeless need a demigod, a prophet. If it is the end, who will heal and lead us? What is a woman but a piece of mother earth for her cult leader lover to offer up? Will she remain a loyal believer or abandon the last hope of her heart?

Loud, ridiculous women in need of an audience disappear. Some use their invisibility as a survival skill, happy to be overlooked in other tales. A girl tells her family story out of sequence in Eyes of Saint Lucy, the main star her strange mother, a chain-smoking, tea and whiskey sipping ‘suburban ascetic’. This wild girl, raised on her mother’s religion of martyred saints and mystics, so much a part of an artist’s dream can’t help but be more her mother than her father’s child. What happens when the feral boy enters the story? This tale was a bit down the rabbit’s hole for me, and I loved it. Untamed or orderly can a woman ever put her faith in men, be they brothers or lovers? This would make a heck of a novel, in my wishful thinking. Mother as wispy as a cloud and yet as deadly as poison.

In We Were a Storybook Back Then a child is trapped in a spell that the other children try desperately to break. Is imagination ever enough to break the curse of being different? In Rabbit by Rabbit memories vanish and reappear, a life like a magic trick in a magicians hat. This one was a little gut punch, because if we live long enough, everything we’ve endured goes into the trick.

There are relationships that sputter to life only to die out, beaten by hard luck or brutal hands. Lion tamers that get eaten, husbands who grow wings, robots curious about humans eroding memories, and a childless couple with moments of extraordinary happiness. There are revenges within and an anchor of pain. I am a fan of Amber Sparks, I loved The Unfinished World and Other Stories and was over the moon to see she has another books of short stories coming out, of course I snagged this ARC. This collection is a bit different, but I still enjoyed it. The women have a voice, and it’s not always pretty which is the point! It’s not about being well behaved little girls, how can one be in dark times? I really hope Sparks writes a full novel, her characters can be messy and dangerous but I still want to spend time with them. Yes, read it.



Publication Date: February 11, 2020

W.W. Norton & Company

Liveright

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

This book is a 2020 release of short stories. I'm starting to become such a big fan of short story collections.
And this book is helping that!

As with any collection, there are a few stories that didn't do much for me. But the majority were a hit.

The cover was also a hit with me.

I unfortunately only made it through 50% of this before DNFing. I think the title and cover art made me think this would be more about revenge than it was. The stories here felt largely unrelated to that and were also so frustrating to read. Either a story would feel unfinished altogether, cutting off where it felt like it was just starting, or I would feel completely uninvested until the last paragraph, having it end just as I was getting excited. I hadn't realized going in that I had tried to read another of Amber Sparks' collections and DNFed that as well for similar reasons, so I think her work just isn't for me. Below are my ratings and minor comments for the stories I did end up reading:

Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy, ⅘. thought i would cry at the end.
You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women, 2.5/5.
A Place for Hiding Precious Things, ⅗.
Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park, 2.5/5. felt unfinished, didn’t get invested until the very last page and then wanted more.
A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier’s Wife, ⅕.
We Destroy the Moon, ⅖.
In Which Athena Designs a Video Game with the Express Purpose of Trolling Her Father, ⅖.
Is the Future a Nice Place for Girls, ⅖.

***Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Netgalley!***

The best thing that I can say about this book was that it was forgettable. The worst thing I can say about this book was that it is forgettable and pointless. The short version of this review is that these aren’t actual short stories. They are pieces of stories. Not a single one of them actually has an ending. They end, but they don’t have an ending. Even the one story that I liked just….ended with no resolution. And several of them were three paragraphs long and left me wondering what the point of even reading it was.

Add in the rampant, militant feminism that every male in the stories is a bad man, hurting women and doing terrible things and every woman needs to be avenged for the collective sins of men and I just couldn’t bear this book at all.

WARNING: Spoilers from here on out.

The one story that I enjoyed was about a couple who can’t stop thinking about the great amount of noise their upstairs neighbors make in the middle of the night. Are they moving bodies up there? Do they own ten Great Danes? Teach midnight tap dancing? Everyone who has had upstairs neighbors knows this feeling. So it was very relatable and fun. But then it was just over. The male of the couple goes upstairs to confront the neighbors about the noise and she just keeps waiting for him to come back, the end. Very abrupt and ended right in the middle of the resolution. This made it so forgettable that it took me ten minutes to remember the premise of this story when I sat down to write this review.

There were also some fact problems with this book. For example, the story about the Sabine women. I am familiar with the story and I am familiar with the varying interpretations of the story over the years. Basically soldiers from Rome invade the city of Sabine killing all the men and taking the women as war trophies to rape and force into marriage. It was a fine story but when the Roman soldiers invade Sabine the women cry out to the goddess Demeter for assistance. Why? Demeter is a fierce goddess to be sure and a great defender of women, but she’s also a Greek goddess. Five minutes on Google will tell you that Sabine was part of the Roman empire in, what is now, Italy. So why would they be crying out in anguish for a Greek goddess’ assistance? That made zero sense and took away from the story.

Also, none of the women actually have to take responsibility for their actions in these stories. Men are bad and women cannot have freedom or happiness until men are eradicated from the world. That’s the main premise of every story in the book. Even when you are living with someone who is obviously mentally ill, has proclaimed themselves a messiah and is planning a massive murder/suicide plot….just blame him for your decision to stay with him and complain that he just abandoned you for his delusions. Don’t try to intervene to get him help or anything, let him go along with his plan but bitch about it every step of the way because obviously he’s the bad guy. Where’s the accountability? Where’s the compassion to try and get someone who you love the help that they obviously need? No, he’s obviously the bad guy and the poor woman doesn’t have to take any accountability for her choices. This is just one example out of many.

Some of the stories even stretch plausibility to the breaking point to make men the bad guy. At one point a girl just randomly happens on the janitor from school abducting her friend and fights to free her. It didn’t fit the story at all and was so unexpected that I just couldn’t get there. I almost thought about abandoning the book at that point because it was nonsensical and only happened to make janitor guy a monster. Or the story about a historical woman who helped her husband achieve greatness while remaining in the darkness herself, despite being more accomplished. This should have been a fascinating story to tell. But instead we got two women joking over text messages about how religion is ridiculous and men are stupid. With almost those exact childish words. Really? I’m supposed to take these women seriously when you paint them as immature children?

At the end of the day I will have forgotten about this book by tomorrow because it was just that pointless.

AND I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU is a quirky and feminist shirt story collection by Amber Sparks that I’m happy I came across. My issue, however, is that try as I might, I will always prefer novels over short stories. There were a few of these I really liked, but overall it just wasn’t for me. I adored the writing though, and the shorter stories (which are more like vignettes) were witty and compact, and those were my favorite. I think a lot of them ask for a large suspension of disbelief and fantasy, which was hard for me. So I’m giving it a two star rating but with the thought that those who love short stories may be much more inclined than I was!

Sometimes I find myself caught in a literary Venn diagram. I'm reading a book by an author, and then I pick up one by another, and the first author happened to write a blurb about it on the back cover or their name is plastered in the accolades at the front -- it's nutty! Two, three weeks ago I went home with Kelly Link's works in my arms; Roxane Gay has been a long-standing favorite of mine; and Carmen Maria Machado's latest memoir recently graced my bookshelf courtesy of a co-worker's early Christmas present, so when I saw Amber Sparks being spoken of with such praise in the same breath as literally *all of the above* I was, like, yo. I'm in.

This collection is wonderful. Absurd. Difficult. Silly, at times; it loosens your guard, then knocks you down when you're least expecting it. This is going on my recommended reading shelf at work as soon as it's out. Can't wait to share it my customers!

And I Do Not Forgive You is a 2020 release, and the short story collection from Amber Sparks with the subtitle “and other revenges.” Boy does it live up to that subtitle. At its heart, the collection shows modern people in the quasi-fantastic, mostly-all-too-real world of technology, familial betrayal, and city life. The princesses, kings, and queens which people some of the most fairy-tale-esque of the stories don’t reside in some 1400s Europe that never was– they live now, here, and struggle as we do now, here. A stand-out in that department was “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines,” where the magical-realist elements meshed so nicely with the themes that I found myself bookmarking it again to read later.

While I didn’t love every story in the collection, I could find myself wanting to read them all again to find new depths. My absolute favorite story was “A Short and Slightly Speculative History of the Lavoisier’s Wife,” which was honestly one of the best short-stories I’ve read in a while in terms of form and voice.

In general, the stories have distinct tones and themes, but each shine with a lush mixture of gritty vernacular (“#Bullshit, I said, and you said the #endtimes was no place for #haters”) and taut phrasing.

And I Do Not Forgive You is a collection you’ll want to share and discuss, both for its feminist themes and commentary on modern life as well as for its prose. Brava to Sparks.

Thank you to Netgalley, who gave me a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Bummer. This collection shows flashes of brilliant writing—hence the two star rating—but it too often falls flat. Many of the stories are too short, incomplete, to the point I found myself shrugging and wondering what the point was of what I’d just read. And a couple stories are too long. Weird. It’s like no story here is the fitting length for its subject matter.

Also, many of the stories take strange and unexpected left turns into the fantastical, which I’m usually fine with . . . but I just don’t think this author writes that sort of thing well. It didn’t grab me, anyway. I preferred the down to earth, contemporary stories. The ones that feel like try-hard parables drag the collection down.

I’m much disappointed in this collection, given the brilliant synopsis and exquisite cover art. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me an ARC. This book releases in February 2020.

I’m willing to admit that the current trending variety of feminism alarms me. I appreciate it, agree with the fact that this might absolutely be historically the best time to be alive for women, but there’s something terrifying about militant feminism (or militant other things, for that matter), what it does to one’s mind, the way it warps perspectives. It’ll probably be a while before some sort of reasonable balance is achieved. For now, it did spawn a variety of feminist fiction, some of which, like this collection, is pretty terrific. But the preamble of this review was to highlight the fact that this book’s appeal for me wasn’t its feminist nature. More so something about the title and the cover. You know, the pedestrian approach to reading selections. But also there was the blending of myths and apocalyptic scenarios and potential for something like magic realism or even supernatural and all those things I do like. So in fact, this was the book that did it all, it absolutely delivered on the cover promise, it completely met its description and it was actually thoroughly feminist without doing that thing where the message overwhelms the story. The writing was absolutely magical, from the first and longest story about a girl in a trailer park and her ghost friend, each of these stories succeeds at drawing the reader in. Each tale is an original, singular delight. The author straddles genres, mixes and matches, thematically and stylistically and the results are pretty freaking awesome. Obviously, all of the stories feature female protagonists and, obviously, all of them have a moral, something along the lines of how one can’t hold a good woman down for long, they shall rise and shine. And again, that’s all good and great, it just wasn’t the main draw for me. I simply enjoyed great storytelling, lovely command of language and notable displays of imagination. The moral was more along the lines of garnish. So basically, I’m trying to say that you might enjoy this book no matter where (within reason) you stand on feminism. The message in these stories is inspirational more so than selfcongratulatory. It doesn’t high five the characters for their gender, it showcases their inner strengths in face of adversity and so on, ability to persevere and rise above.. And that’s a good message for any audience. A very enjoyable quick read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

Amber Sparks is clearly a smart, witty, and weird author. I would have enjoyed this collection more perhaps if it had been slimmed down - I thought the longer stories, such as "The Eyes of Saint Lucy" and "Everyone's a Winner in Meadow Park," were excellent. The majority, though, seem to be prose poems and sketches like in Margaret Atwood's Good Bones and Simple Murders. Those are fun to read, but I personally would prefer a collection of ten to eleven longer stories.