...anywhere there’s water, especially rioting water, it can tattle tales to your mother. [loc. 2545]
Eighteen short stories by Nalo Hopkinson, all with some element of the fantastic, some quite slight, many foregrounding young black women, several featuring queer and poly relationships. There are stories of metamorphosis (I especially liked 'The Smile on the Face', which riffs on the idea that if you swallow a cherry stone a tree starts growing inside you) and transformations of other works ('Shift' is a reimagining of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' from Caliban's perspective). SF tropes such as time travel, zombies, and genetic engineering are twisted into unexpected shapes, and elements of Caribbean folklore (Mama d'Lo, douen children) are given 'contemporary' settings.
That all sounds like a list: I'm not good at reviewing story collections, especially single-author collections where there is, perhaps, less contrast between stories and styles than in a multi-author anthology. I generally limited my reading to one story per session, but some of the stories have admixed in my memory.
That said, 'The Smile on the Face' -- which is a story about adolescence, about the cruelty of high-school bitchery, and about learning to love yourself the way you are -- left a powerful impression on me: definitely my favourite of the stories in here, though I suspect that others will deepen with rereading. 'The Easthound', a zombie-apocalypse story in which children, immune to a virus that transforms adults, survive in the ruins of a Canadian city, had a particularly effective and poignant twist. And 'Emily Breakfast', in which cats fly and chickens are descended from dragons, was a charming and cheering fantasy story with a queer setting.
Fulfils the 'Short Story Collection by a Caribbean Author' prompt of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.
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