There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

this was a good read, the characters were good and I really enjoyed reading this. It was an interesting plot and I liked the way the author writes.

"I have known you ever since the world was the distance that separated us but never kept us from meeting. I have known you forever, since the first fear of meeting you. I have known you before desire. I have known you in the unknown of strangers. And since then, the desire to touch things, intimate, incorporeal, and ephemeral, at all hours has begun—because though they may finish, they do not end. I have known you from inside desire. I have known you as surely as a missed beat in an unfinished movement. I have known you since the feeling of warmth in my chest, chill in my belly, bother in my plexus, since throat stumbles and knotted feet. I have known you from the edge of harsh conversation and of mornings over bedsheets. I have known you feeling whole and frightened. I have known you in tears and in pleasure. And in years again. And in tongue and speech and moan. I have known you clearly eyed, ever since the world was the rustle of your eyelashes. And I have known you ever since the world was tactile, tempestuous, yet forgettable saudade. And I have known you ever since the world. And I have known you wanting. And I have known you. And I have."
- First Distance, Farewell Inventory: A Story In Four Distances

Thank you AmazonCrossing and NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc in return for my honest feedback.

Amora is a collection of intimate short stories and poems of women in love, daring to capture such candid, private moments.

Divided into two parts: 'Big & Juicy', consisting quick poignant short stories and 'Short & Tart', consisting prose poetries- the collection transcends over profuse instances and experiences exploring sexualities and identities of women in love. With stories that make your heart ache, such as a story with embedded homophobia in a society which is questioned by a little girl who is attracted to girls rather than to boys and of another girl's aftermath of her breakup with her girlfriend to a story of an elderly woman coming in terms with her sexuality or of another, with fortune and happiness to live a life with Her One for the rest of her days, Polesso brings softer & innocent love to fiery & passionate love with equal depth and intensity with her poetical writing that sheds lights on the nuances of her characters and their stories.

Never have I felt the word 'intimate' not enough in a context, as I do at this moment. It's been months since I read this heart-swaying read and it still burns bright in my memory. And when I say that, I mean it about every single one of those 33 short stories and poems exploring the exquisiteness and complexities of the female romance. I can recall each one of them vividly and the emotions it stirred inside of me. The official description of this collection promises "...an illuminating portrait of the sacred female romance, with all its nuances, complexities, burdens, and triumphs revealed. Violence, sickness, chaos, tenderness, beauty, and freedom adorn these pages in a mosaic of unforgettable moments..." and it doesn't fail to deliver that. To be even more honest, it delivers so much more, leaving an everlasting mark on the reader's soul.

Rarely does a translated work not feel like one. Translated works tend to remind you in-between your read when you reach that one part which gives the famous phrase, 'lost in translation', it's meaning. But the translation was so soft and idyllic that one has to remind themself constantly that this is a translated piece of art. But it doesn't stop me from wondering just how powerful the original stories and poems quintessence must be. And it saddens me to know that I would never be able to experience it because that's just how anyone would feel the aftermath of this read.

There were many stories in this collection that I would have read a full-length novel about. Rarely do I feel that way about short stories but I did. With that, Polesso has stolen a permanent spot in my heart and soul! This is be something that will always roll off my tongue when someone asks me my must-read recommendations. I'll be cherishing this read and its impact over me for years to come!

Amora is a beautiful collection of stories by Brazilian author Natalia Borges Polesso. They tell of women embracing they're spiritually, sexually, and independence.

I literally devoured this book after the first two stories. Most of the stories are written elegantly and poetic. My two favorite stories in this book are "Grandma, Are You A Lesibian?" and "Aunties." With both stories it embraces the fact that at that time period same sex relationships had to be hidden. The main characters were not able to reveal their true selves until later on in their life. Those stories to me prime example of some of LGBTQ+ community still struggle with.

Thank you so much Amazon Crossing for letting me read this book!

I had come across this short story collection from an article in Granta and was intrigued. However, although a few phrases have lingered in my head, most of the stories are too brief and inconclusive to hold much of my interest.

There was a variety of different formats included, like an email exchange and script-like dialogue between characters, but those felt gimmicky to me. The themes of denying identity, first love, mourning suicide also were presented in such a way that felt familiar, and not in a good way. I could hear the author's voice permeate all the different characters, despite their ostensibly different life situations. I found myself wishing there was more compelling conflict and not just scenes that seemed to be forced by the author's hand.

Maybe this is a limitation of the short story format, but I could only get through roughly half of the book before losing interest. On a positive note, it is hard to find lesbian representation in literature, so this is a collection worthy of recognition in that respect.

Amora won several major literary prizes when it was first published in Brazil several years ago, and having just got my hands on the soon-to-be-published English translation, I can see why.

The short stories in this collection by Natalia Borges Polesso are often intimate, often poignant, and always beautifully written. They mostly explore love between women, all the way from teenage explorations to fifty-year relationships. They are a pleasure to read.

“Short stories” can encompass quite a range of formats, so let me make it clear that the stories in Amora are definitely on the shorter end of the spectrum: 33 stories in a book of about 250 pages. Some of the stories towards the end, in the “Short & Tart” section, are just a page or two, with beautiful writing but little plot to speak of: they reminded me more of prose poetry. Even the earlier ones in the “Big & Juicy” section are generally quite quick reads.

What this means is that, although some stories stood out for me over others, the collection made more of a holistic impression on me, as I read several stories in a single sitting, and the themes and characters from one story spilt over into another. The downside was that I didn’t get to stay very long with characters or situations that had intrigued me, but the advantage was an impressive sense of cohesion in a set of really quite disparate stories.

Much of the love in Amora is hidden. In the first story, a seventeen-year-old girl invents convincing details of losing her virginity to a boy in the back of a Chevette with 4 Non Blondes playing on the radio, as she tries to hide “the unmentionable thing”.

Even when she finally has a more satisfying encounter with the beautiful, red-lipped Leticia, they keep it secret:

“No one saw anything or said anything. Not even them.”

In another story, “My Cousin’s in Town”, a woman brings some work colleagues home, thinking her lover is away on business, but then she hears her in the shower as soon as she opens the door. She tells them Bruna is her cousin, in town for an exam, which causes problems because Bruna is more open about their relationship.

“After they left, I went to talk to Bruna and all she said was that at some point things would have to change. Then she laughed at the ridiculousness of it all and said the truth would’ve been painless, but … maybe, she wasn’t sure, maybe she was wrong. The fact is, we’re still trying.”

Although the stories are short, Polesso manages to cram in a lot of information and depth about each of the relationships she explores, so that by the end of each one, you really feel the nuances of them, the love, the loss, the deceptions and confidences.

In some stories, we see the surrounding homophobia that explains some of the secrecy. I loved “Flor”, in which a young child overhears her family referring to the neighbour, Flor, as a “machorra“. She asks what it means, and her mother lies and tells her it’s an illness, which prompts her to pick some flowers from around the house, put them in a glass and leave them for Flor, with a note wishing her to get well soon and asking her to “please put the flowers in a vase and return the glass because my mom would probably notice it was missing.”

Later her friend tries to explain what a machorra is by saying they’re women who like girls more than boys, and the little girl then thinks she must be a machorra too, because she likes girls more than boys, and so she thinks she’s sick too. It’s a touching story and a great way of exploring the disparaging language people use, through the innocent, as yet prejudice-free eyes of a child.

That’s not to say that all the stories in Amora are about secrecy and suppression, however, and the characters in them are certainly not victims. What comes across most strongly is the love and strength of feeling that no external disapproval can affect.

There’s a lot of humour in the stories, too. In “Aunt Betty”, Daniela and her partner Tereza visit hateful old Aunt Betty with Daniela’s gay cousin Marcos. They pretend that Marcos is married to Tereza and tell her Daniela has uterine cancer, and each time one of them leaves the room to go the bathroom, they eavesdrop on the nasty and completely misinformed things she says about them, laughing even more at what she would say if she knew the truth. It doesn’t sound that funny the way I’m describing it, but the scene really worked well.

The even shorter stories towards the end contained some beautiful imagery, but I found less to hold onto, and although I appreciated and admired the prose, I didn’t enjoy them as much as the earlier, more character-driven stories.

Overall, I’d recommend Amora to anyone looking for some thoughtful, beautifully written Brazilian fiction in translation. There are some truly memorable stories in this collection, and they work together beautifully to create a vision of all the diverse forms that love and human relationships can take. It’s a wonderful read.

A varied collection of stories and poems from Brazilian writer Natalia Borges Polesso about romantic love between women. The stories include women in many stages of life, married and single, searching within themselves or society, some grappling with loving another woman for the first time. This is an underexplored topic in popular literature, and I would welcome more novels and short story collections that include realistic stories about lesbian love. In this collection I found many of the characters somewhat one-dimensional, and the tensions they face soon began to feel recycled. The book is split into two sections - one of longer, more narrative stories, and the second of short poetic pieces. I was more drawn to the latter. Their abstract nature allowed me to fill in the gaps and extrapolate emotions and desires in ways that the stories did not allow space for. I also felt the translation could have been improved as certain word choices felt out of place, and some sentences clunky or unnatural in English.

This was my first short story collection, so it’s going to be a tough one for me to review since I have no frame of reference, but I’ll do my best. I read the English translation of this book, which contains thirty-three short stories and poems about women who love women. Being a lesbian myself, I was intrigued.

Natalia Borges Polesso has a very trendy, poetic writing style: alternating short, punchy sentences and long run-on sentences, long paragraphs, repetition, lots of purple prose. Most of the time she doesn’t bother with quotation marks when her characters are speaking, a pet peeve of mine. She writes some stories in first person and others in third, some in present tense and others in past. Occasionally, she uses second person or future tense, which almost always takes me out of a story. She has this way of leaving things purposefully vague so the details are up to your imagination; this was sometimes intriguing and sometimes confusing.

The first section of the book, “Big & Juicy,” consists of twenty-two longer stories. The second section, “Short & Tart,” consists of eleven very short ones that were more like poems. I disliked most of the “Short & Tart” stories (poems?); there wasn’t enough substance to them.