rorikae's review against another edition
dark
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
'Jagannath' by Karin Tidback is a speculative short story collection full of strange stories, many that are great and a few that I found lackluster.
The collection starts out on a high note with a strange story called 'Beatrice' about a man who falls in love with an airship and a woman who falls in love with a steam engine. It starts out fantastical and takes a darker turn at the end that I wasn't expecting but that I think did a great job of setting up the rest of the collection. After the first story, there were a number of stories that were on the shorter side and that I felt were never given the full time to come into their own. These were my least favorite in the collection and because there were so many of them toward the front of the collection, it really dragged down my enjoyment of the whole. Thankfully, about halfway through the stories pick up with 'Brita's Holiday Village' and keep on getting better. My two favorite stories in the collection are 'Cloudberry Jam,' which tells the story of a woman who grows her own child in a tin can and then has to deal with the truth of a child growing up, and 'Pyret' which is set up as a scholarly paper discussing a folklore creature called the Pyret.
Tidbeck shines when she is utilizing folklore in her stories, even when there are just a few moments of it. I also really appreciated her afterword, which discusses translation. Tidbeck translated some of the stories from Swedish and wrote some of the others in English. She discusses what it is like writing in English vs. Swedish, including how there are concepts she can't translate and how careful she has to be with translations because a direct translation may have words that don't feel the same and fit the tone of the piece. It was the perfect cap to the collection.
I will definitely be picking up more from Tidbeck and I am interested in her full novels since her longer pieces were the ones that I thought were the most successful.
The collection starts out on a high note with a strange story called 'Beatrice' about a man who falls in love with an airship and a woman who falls in love with a steam engine. It starts out fantastical and takes a darker turn at the end that I wasn't expecting but that I think did a great job of setting up the rest of the collection. After the first story, there were a number of stories that were on the shorter side and that I felt were never given the full time to come into their own. These were my least favorite in the collection and because there were so many of them toward the front of the collection, it really dragged down my enjoyment of the whole. Thankfully, about halfway through the stories pick up with 'Brita's Holiday Village' and keep on getting better. My two favorite stories in the collection are 'Cloudberry Jam,' which tells the story of a woman who grows her own child in a tin can and then has to deal with the truth of a child growing up, and 'Pyret' which is set up as a scholarly paper discussing a folklore creature called the Pyret.
Tidbeck shines when she is utilizing folklore in her stories, even when there are just a few moments of it. I also really appreciated her afterword, which discusses translation. Tidbeck translated some of the stories from Swedish and wrote some of the others in English. She discusses what it is like writing in English vs. Swedish, including how there are concepts she can't translate and how careful she has to be with translations because a direct translation may have words that don't feel the same and fit the tone of the piece. It was the perfect cap to the collection.
I will definitely be picking up more from Tidbeck and I am interested in her full novels since her longer pieces were the ones that I thought were the most successful.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Body horror, Cannibalism, Death, Grief, Rape, and Violence
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