feliciaj's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Veronica Schanoes is an exceptionally skilled writer; that much is obvious from her short-story collection. I respect her craftsmanship, despite the fact not all of the stories worked for me. She is above all a agenda-driven writer who does not shy away from brutality, either in the past or in the modern world. Her stories howl with anguish, demanding to know why we do not do better by our fellow human beings. Antisemitism, labor rights, sexual abuse, and mental illness feature prominently in her work.
The stories that worked best for me largely followed a traditional narrative structure and had historical elements, including Among the Thorns, Phosphorus, and Burning Girls. I also appreciated the punk-saturated Ballroom Blitz for its unflinching look at depression, and the weird-house tale Swimming, in which the experimental structure uniquely suited the story. Alice: A Fantasia, Serpents, and Lost in the Supermarket left me scratching my head. I was not always enamored of Schanoes's habit of inserting herself into her tales. They sometimes read like political essays rather than stories; Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga is the most prominent example.
Despite the weaknesses of some of the stories, I was enthralled enough with this collection's strongest moments to seek out more from this author in the future.
Reviews of the short stories:
Among the Thorns, 5/5. In 17th-century Germany, Itte loses her father to antisemitic violence and devotes her life to seeking revenge on the town where he was made to dance in thorns and then hanged.
I loved how Schanoes executed the slow burn of her tale, making space to show how Yakov's death affects his family as they live on without him. It makes the revenge story all the more affecting, and the unexpected compassion Itte finds within herself more poignant.
The writing was brutal, not shying away from centuries of cruelty toward Jews, but also lyrical and utterly compelling. The ending was perfect - not unjust, but tempered with mercy.
How to Bring Someone Back from the Dead, 4/5. A surreal, unsettling meditation on the mindset of a person who is about to lose a loved one. Schanoes weaves together imagery from the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Snow White, and modern-day hospital rooms. She evokes the feelings of pain, numbness, and shocked detachment experienced by nearly everyone who lives long enough to lose someone they cherish. A painful listen, but weirdly compelling. The last sentence roots the story firmly in the finality of the real world.
Alice: A Fantasia, 2/5. I liked two-thirds of this, which speculated on how Alice Liddell and her sisters may have been affected by their controversial relationship with Lewis Carroll. Then the whole thing fell apart with a nonsensical rhyming-word fugue that went on for nearly 5 minutes. I think Schanoes was trying to emulate Carroll's wordplay (a la Jabberwocky) but it brought what was a promising story to a screeching, confusing halt.
Phosphorus, 5/5. Schanoes tells the story of an historic labor strike by putting readers into the shoes of a match-factory worker dying from "phossy jaw" in London in 1888. As their intolerable working conditions drive desperate women to strike, the protagonist's grandmother makes a heartrending sacrifice to allow her to live long enough to witness the outcome.
The story unflinchingly depicts human exploitation in pursuit of greater profits, condemning a system in which so many must suffer before the most modest of reforms are enacted.
Ballroom Blitz, 4.5/5. 12 brothers are cursed to live in a seedy punk club forever, after the eldest nearly kills a teen boy in a bar fight. They party hard all night and wake each morning to despair, with broken bodies and killer hangovers.
When Isabelle walks into the club with her 11 sisters, Jake sees their salvation. They must dance together for 101 nights to break the curse. Jake is so focused on what he needs from Isabelle, he doesn't wonder what brought her to the club or the cause of her frequent black moods.
A contemporary parable about learning to truly care for another person, as well as an unflinching look at struggling to function with a mental illness.
Serpents, 2/5. An updated little Red Riding Hood, in which Charlotte takes "the path of pins," falls down a rabbit hole into the NYC subway system, and finally arrives at grandma's house. Twisty and weird, with some effective urban imagery, but the ending made absolutely no sense.
Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga, 3/5. Part historical essay, part fantasy story, and part personal meditation on leftist politics. After losing her beloved older sister and growing disillusioned with the Bolshevik revolution, Goldman considers a tempting offer from the fabled Russian witch. The story was most effective focusing on their meeting and Goldman's choice. I think Schanoes could have told her story entirely through the lens of fantasy without inserting her meta-perspective, which felt awkward.
Rats, 4/5. A fictionalized retelling of the heroin- and despair-fueled relationship of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen that offers a plausible explanation of how she died. Similar in theme to Ballroom Blitz but darker and more uncompromising. A savage critique of the romanticization and commodification of mental illness, drug addiction, and early death.
Lost in the Supermarket, 2/5. Schanoes really likes punk music and Alice in Wonderland. This is the third story to reference Alice and the third to use punk as a storytelling device . Like Serpents, it's vague and weird, and I'm not sure what point she was trying to make. The Queen of Hearts has trapped a young woman in an endless supermarket, and the ghost of Joe Strummer of the Clash comes to help her. The message seems to be to remain true to one's passions to achieve freedom, but it's shoehorned in at the very end.
Swimming, 4.5/5. An experimental story I really enjoyed, about a strange couple endlessly adding onto their behemoth of a house in increasingly weird ways. They have built a special floor for their son and his fiancé to live with them, but the prospective bride feels like she is drowning inside the house. She makes an escape plan. I interpreted the fantastical ending as a metaphor for a couple finding their own way in life, embracing their differences as well as similarities, and casting off family notions of how they should live.
Lily Glass, 4/5. Rose, who changes her name to Lily to become a Hollywood star, barely knows herself when she marries an aging playboy actor. Her life was first consumed by survival, growing up poor in a tenement, then by learning to change her looks and personality to fit the demands of film roles. She falls in love with her husband's daughter, who is two years younger than her, but her lack of knowledge of who she really is threatens to destroy her. A cautionary tale on the importance of personal identity as well as an indictment of the Hollywood system that chews up and spits out so many young stars.
The Revenant, 4/5. A story of the effects of trauma with an experimental structure that shifts between past and present and from first to third person. I was a little confused at the beginning. In middle age, a woman resurrects the part of herself she destroyed to survive sexual abuse. As a soon-to-be therapist, I loved the ending, which embraced how healing can take place.
Burning Girls, 5/5. A novella-length tale steeped in Jewish folk magic and tragedy, which follows a family from Poland to America in the early 1900s. It centers on Deborah, a worker of holy magic, who does her best to protect her loved ones with charms and spells. Twice, she must use her most powerful magic against a child-stealing demon, and each time, the magic exacts a terrible price. The story's title refers to the Polish pogroms against Jews - in America, Jews are not burned, Deborah's mother promises. But Deborah and her sister escape European antisemitism only to face worker exploitation in the New World's factories. A powerful, brutal story of familial love, which shows how love may not be enough when larger forces threaten those we cherish.
The stories that worked best for me largely followed a traditional narrative structure and had historical elements, including Among the Thorns, Phosphorus, and Burning Girls. I also appreciated the punk-saturated Ballroom Blitz for its unflinching look at depression, and the weird-house tale Swimming, in which the experimental structure uniquely suited the story. Alice: A Fantasia, Serpents, and Lost in the Supermarket left me scratching my head. I was not always enamored of Schanoes's habit of inserting herself into her tales. They sometimes read like political essays rather than stories; Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga is the most prominent example.
Despite the weaknesses of some of the stories, I was enthralled enough with this collection's strongest moments to seek out more from this author in the future.
Reviews of the short stories:
Among the Thorns, 5/5. In 17th-century Germany, Itte loses her father to antisemitic violence and devotes her life to seeking revenge on the town where he was made to dance in thorns and then hanged.
I loved how Schanoes executed the slow burn of her tale, making space to show how Yakov's death affects his family as they live on without him. It makes the revenge story all the more affecting, and the unexpected compassion Itte finds within herself more poignant.
The writing was brutal, not shying away from centuries of cruelty toward Jews, but also lyrical and utterly compelling. The ending was perfect - not unjust, but tempered with mercy.
How to Bring Someone Back from the Dead, 4/5. A surreal, unsettling meditation on the mindset of a person who is about to lose a loved one. Schanoes weaves together imagery from the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Snow White, and modern-day hospital rooms. She evokes the feelings of pain, numbness, and shocked detachment experienced by nearly everyone who lives long enough to lose someone they cherish. A painful listen, but weirdly compelling. The last sentence roots the story firmly in the finality of the real world.
Alice: A Fantasia, 2/5. I liked two-thirds of this, which speculated on how Alice Liddell and her sisters may have been affected by their controversial relationship with Lewis Carroll. Then the whole thing fell apart with a nonsensical rhyming-word fugue that went on for nearly 5 minutes. I think Schanoes was trying to emulate Carroll's wordplay (a la Jabberwocky) but it brought what was a promising story to a screeching, confusing halt.
Phosphorus, 5/5. Schanoes tells the story of an historic labor strike by putting readers into the shoes of a match-factory worker dying from "phossy jaw" in London in 1888. As their intolerable working conditions drive desperate women to strike, the protagonist's grandmother makes a heartrending sacrifice to allow her to live long enough to witness the outcome.
The story unflinchingly depicts human exploitation in pursuit of greater profits, condemning a system in which so many must suffer before the most modest of reforms are enacted.
Ballroom Blitz, 4.5/5. 12 brothers are cursed to live in a seedy punk club forever, after the eldest nearly kills a teen boy in a bar fight. They party hard all night and wake each morning to despair, with broken bodies and killer hangovers.
When Isabelle walks into the club with her 11 sisters, Jake sees their salvation. They must dance together for 101 nights to break the curse. Jake is so focused on what he needs from Isabelle, he doesn't wonder what brought her to the club or the cause of her frequent black moods.
A contemporary parable about learning to truly care for another person, as well as an unflinching look at struggling to function with a mental illness.
Serpents, 2/5. An updated little Red Riding Hood, in which Charlotte takes "the path of pins," falls down a rabbit hole into the NYC subway system, and finally arrives at grandma's house. Twisty and weird, with some effective urban imagery, but the ending made absolutely no sense.
Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga, 3/5. Part historical essay, part fantasy story, and part personal meditation on leftist politics. After losing her beloved older sister and growing disillusioned with the Bolshevik revolution, Goldman considers a tempting offer from the fabled Russian witch. The story was most effective focusing on their meeting and Goldman's choice. I think Schanoes could have told her story entirely through the lens of fantasy without inserting her meta-perspective, which felt awkward.
Rats, 4/5. A fictionalized retelling of the heroin- and despair-fueled relationship of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen that offers a plausible explanation of how she died. Similar in theme to Ballroom Blitz but darker and more uncompromising. A savage critique of the romanticization and commodification of mental illness, drug addiction, and early death.
Lost in the Supermarket, 2/5. Schanoes really likes punk music and Alice in Wonderland. This is the third story to reference Alice and the third to use punk as a storytelling device . Like Serpents, it's vague and weird, and I'm not sure what point she was trying to make. The Queen of Hearts has trapped a young woman in an endless supermarket, and the ghost of Joe Strummer of the Clash comes to help her. The message seems to be to remain true to one's passions to achieve freedom, but it's shoehorned in at the very end.
Swimming, 4.5/5. An experimental story I really enjoyed, about a strange couple endlessly adding onto their behemoth of a house in increasingly weird ways. They have built a special floor for their son and his fiancé to live with them, but the prospective bride feels like she is drowning inside the house. She makes an escape plan. I interpreted the fantastical ending as a metaphor for a couple finding their own way in life, embracing their differences as well as similarities, and casting off family notions of how they should live.
Lily Glass, 4/5. Rose, who changes her name to Lily to become a Hollywood star, barely knows herself when she marries an aging playboy actor. Her life was first consumed by survival, growing up poor in a tenement, then by learning to change her looks and personality to fit the demands of film roles. She falls in love with her husband's daughter, who is two years younger than her, but her lack of knowledge of who she really is threatens to destroy her. A cautionary tale on the importance of personal identity as well as an indictment of the Hollywood system that chews up and spits out so many young stars.
The Revenant, 4/5. A story of the effects of trauma with an experimental structure that shifts between past and present and from first to third person. I was a little confused at the beginning. In middle age, a woman resurrects the part of herself she destroyed to survive sexual abuse. As a soon-to-be therapist, I loved the ending, which embraced how healing can take place.
Burning Girls, 5/5. A novella-length tale steeped in Jewish folk magic and tragedy, which follows a family from Poland to America in the early 1900s. It centers on Deborah, a worker of holy magic, who does her best to protect her loved ones with charms and spells. Twice, she must use her most powerful magic against a child-stealing demon, and each time, the magic exacts a terrible price. The story's title refers to the Polish pogroms against Jews - in America, Jews are not burned, Deborah's mother promises. But Deborah and her sister escape European antisemitism only to face worker exploitation in the New World's factories. A powerful, brutal story of familial love, which shows how love may not be enough when larger forces threaten those we cherish.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism and Sexual assault
Moderate: Mental illness
jmcordero's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism, Blood, Body horror, Chronic illness, Confinement, Vomit, Violence, Terminal illness, and Death of parent
Moderate: Alcohol, Alcoholism, Addiction, Torture, Sexual content, Sexism, Rape, Sexual violence, Sexual assault, Pregnancy, Pedophilia, Murder, Misogyny, Mental illness, Grief, Drug use, Drug abuse, and Child death
Minor: Xenophobia and War
mirichasha's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes
Thank you to NetGalley and Tantor Audio for the audiobook Advanced Reader’s Copy, which I received for free in exchange for an honest review.
The forward, by Jane Yolen, sold me completely on this book. Now that I’ve read the book, I agree wholeheartedly, and am blown away by the haunting beauty of so many of these stories.
Our protagonists, in true fairytale fashion (but perhaps better than I’ve ever seen it) are pushed by circumstance and historical context and prejudice and sometimes cruelty, into situations where they seem to have no choices left. It’s then that the fantastical elements of the stories come in. Through magic - sometimes ugly and grotesque magic and always with a cost – our characters retain their agency and fight back, even though they rarely win a happy ending. Indeed, these stories don’t center around the concept of happy endings, or endings, or happiness. When revenge is sought and even found, it does not end in total absolution and a clean-cut ending. At the beginning of “Rats,” Schanoes notes that all stories lie in order to wrap up cleanly, in order to have a beginning middle and end, and she plays with this truth as she writes. These stories are truer to life than a story fairly ending with, “the end,” and settle in a messier land of quiet, too-young deaths after final victories, the hope of resettling in a new place to start again after loss, the idea that even knowing the worse is coming, there will still be good on its way, and so there may be enough hope left to keep trying.
Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time, with particular quotes still ringing in my head. Some I didn’t quite understand, or read through without particularly connecting to, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the collection as a whole. I’ll write individually about each story (I have listened to the audiobook twice – first just to enjoy it, and then to guide my review, remember the names of the stories, and see if I understood anything differently the second time around.)
My favorite story was “The Revenant.” (Trigger warning for grooming of and then sexual relationship/assault of a sixteen-year-old girl by a middle aged man) The quote, "Trauma is suffering that will not stay in its temporal position,” will stay with me, as well as the surrounding paragraphs and the rest of this reflective, painful story. The way this talks about messy trauma, and is written directly addressing abusive men, knowing they won’t listen or change. It ends without true healing or vindication, and therefore stays real and relatable, even if it is human nature to yearn for the fantasy of that one perfect act of revenge or truth or justice achieved, the book closed. This story sits with you in the midst of the pain from a place lighter than it is dark, more than it leads you through to a final promised land.
My second favorite was, “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga,” which held so much, as Yolen stated in her introduction - a biography and an autobiography and a fairytale and a history and a political manifesto all wrapped into one fable. A favorite quote was, “The means do become the ends, because there is no end. There are just ongoing moments.”
“Among the Thorns,” the first story, was the exact kind of Jewish fairytale I was hoping to find in another book I read recently. I would love a second collection of stories with more of this fashion: Jewish fairytale retellings set in historical times, with antisemitism as one of the evils lurking in the woods, the divine feminine as a morally gray figure bringing the morality and powerful absence of the more traditional masculine God into question. I appreciated the queer background character in this very first story, which let me know I was welcome within these pages.
“Phosphorus” is a horror story where the fantastical, magical element is a small balm of relief set across the horror of the true historical context of capitalism, greed and cruelty and disregard of human life.
The title story, “Burning Girls,” reminds me of Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon (and like it, has a queer main character). It felt both familiar and new with the ill-met grasp at agency that the Lilith demon represents for this family. This brought a new lens to stories I’ve read about so many times before – pogroms, emigration to America, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Indeed, I think a quintessential experience of book-loving-Jewish-girls is reading narrative after narrative that touches on that one fateful night at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory – however tragic it was, it feels like as much a part of my childhood as the stories of Cinderella and Snow White.
Speaking of Snow White, “Lily Glass” was a beautiful if tragic and toxic retelling of Snow White, where the young stepmother who has smothered her childhood of poverty and illness and changed her Jewish name to one more fitting for her tenuous new life as a Hollywood star, falls more for her troubled adult stepdaughter than her powerful co-star and new husband, unravelling the false self she has created and become.
The other stories all had an interesting ambience and writing style but for one reason or another didn’t make my favorites list. “Ballroom Blitz” was interesting and well-written but didn’t speak to me as much personally. It did remind me a bit of Julie and the Phantoms and Caleb’s club, which I was not expecting to be thinking about while reading this collection. “Serpents” was so fascinating but also made almost no sense to me, which might have been the intention. Or maybe it’s about adolescence and growing into a woman, a serpent? I could not tell you. I felt like I was an inch away from fully grasping “Lost in the Supermarket” and “Swimming,” which both transform the real horror of gentrification and late capitalism into exaggerated tales of living buildings our protagonists are, or are afraid of becoming, trapped in. I didn’t realize who “Rats” was about until I read other reviews, and it makes more sense to me now (and I loved its intro about fairytales repeating themselves). I did not quite understand “How To Bring Someone Back from the Dead”, or “Alice: A Fantasia,” especially the second half of the latter.
The audiobook was great. Most of the time, it felt like the exact right way to be reading the stories, and I was truly in the stories rather than noticing that someone was reading it to me. I do think this is the kind of book I’d like to have both a text and audio version of, as some stories, most especially “The Revenant,” I’d probably prefer to read as text, at least have the option to do so. I did speed up the audiobook to listen, but that is normal for me.
I am more of a library user (and Kindle deals hunter) than a book purchaser in general, but I’m definitely buying a copy of this as I know I will want to reread many of these stories over and over.
Thank you to NetGalley and Tantor Audio for the audiobook Advanced Reader’s Copy, which I received for free in exchange for an honest review.
The forward, by Jane Yolen, sold me completely on this book. Now that I’ve read the book, I agree wholeheartedly, and am blown away by the haunting beauty of so many of these stories.
Our protagonists, in true fairytale fashion (but perhaps better than I’ve ever seen it) are pushed by circumstance and historical context and prejudice and sometimes cruelty, into situations where they seem to have no choices left. It’s then that the fantastical elements of the stories come in. Through magic - sometimes ugly and grotesque magic and always with a cost – our characters retain their agency and fight back, even though they rarely win a happy ending. Indeed, these stories don’t center around the concept of happy endings, or endings, or happiness. When revenge is sought and even found, it does not end in total absolution and a clean-cut ending. At the beginning of “Rats,” Schanoes notes that all stories lie in order to wrap up cleanly, in order to have a beginning middle and end, and she plays with this truth as she writes. These stories are truer to life than a story fairly ending with, “the end,” and settle in a messier land of quiet, too-young deaths after final victories, the hope of resettling in a new place to start again after loss, the idea that even knowing the worse is coming, there will still be good on its way, and so there may be enough hope left to keep trying.
Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time, with particular quotes still ringing in my head. Some I didn’t quite understand, or read through without particularly connecting to, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the collection as a whole. I’ll write individually about each story (I have listened to the audiobook twice – first just to enjoy it, and then to guide my review, remember the names of the stories, and see if I understood anything differently the second time around.)
My favorite story was “The Revenant.” (Trigger warning for grooming of and then sexual relationship/assault of a sixteen-year-old girl by a middle aged man) The quote, "Trauma is suffering that will not stay in its temporal position,” will stay with me, as well as the surrounding paragraphs and the rest of this reflective, painful story. The way this talks about messy trauma, and is written directly addressing abusive men, knowing they won’t listen or change. It ends without true healing or vindication, and therefore stays real and relatable, even if it is human nature to yearn for the fantasy of that one perfect act of revenge or truth or justice achieved, the book closed. This story sits with you in the midst of the pain from a place lighter than it is dark, more than it leads you through to a final promised land.
My second favorite was, “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga,” which held so much, as Yolen stated in her introduction - a biography and an autobiography and a fairytale and a history and a political manifesto all wrapped into one fable. A favorite quote was, “The means do become the ends, because there is no end. There are just ongoing moments.”
“Among the Thorns,” the first story, was the exact kind of Jewish fairytale I was hoping to find in another book I read recently. I would love a second collection of stories with more of this fashion: Jewish fairytale retellings set in historical times, with antisemitism as one of the evils lurking in the woods, the divine feminine as a morally gray figure bringing the morality and powerful absence of the more traditional masculine God into question. I appreciated the queer background character in this very first story, which let me know I was welcome within these pages.
“Phosphorus” is a horror story where the fantastical, magical element is a small balm of relief set across the horror of the true historical context of capitalism, greed and cruelty and disregard of human life.
The title story, “Burning Girls,” reminds me of Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon (and like it, has a queer main character). It felt both familiar and new with the ill-met grasp at agency that the Lilith demon represents for this family. This brought a new lens to stories I’ve read about so many times before – pogroms, emigration to America, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Indeed, I think a quintessential experience of book-loving-Jewish-girls is reading narrative after narrative that touches on that one fateful night at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory – however tragic it was, it feels like as much a part of my childhood as the stories of Cinderella and Snow White.
Speaking of Snow White, “Lily Glass” was a beautiful if tragic and toxic retelling of Snow White, where the young stepmother who has smothered her childhood of poverty and illness and changed her Jewish name to one more fitting for her tenuous new life as a Hollywood star, falls more for her troubled adult stepdaughter than her powerful co-star and new husband, unravelling the false self she has created and become.
The other stories all had an interesting ambience and writing style but for one reason or another didn’t make my favorites list. “Ballroom Blitz” was interesting and well-written but didn’t speak to me as much personally. It did remind me a bit of Julie and the Phantoms and Caleb’s club, which I was not expecting to be thinking about while reading this collection. “Serpents” was so fascinating but also made almost no sense to me, which might have been the intention. Or maybe it’s about adolescence and growing into a woman, a serpent? I could not tell you. I felt like I was an inch away from fully grasping “Lost in the Supermarket” and “Swimming,” which both transform the real horror of gentrification and late capitalism into exaggerated tales of living buildings our protagonists are, or are afraid of becoming, trapped in. I didn’t realize who “Rats” was about until I read other reviews, and it makes more sense to me now (and I loved its intro about fairytales repeating themselves). I did not quite understand “How To Bring Someone Back from the Dead”, or “Alice: A Fantasia,” especially the second half of the latter.
The audiobook was great. Most of the time, it felt like the exact right way to be reading the stories, and I was truly in the stories rather than noticing that someone was reading it to me. I do think this is the kind of book I’d like to have both a text and audio version of, as some stories, most especially “The Revenant,” I’d probably prefer to read as text, at least have the option to do so. I did speed up the audiobook to listen, but that is normal for me.
I am more of a library user (and Kindle deals hunter) than a book purchaser in general, but I’m definitely buying a copy of this as I know I will want to reread many of these stories over and over.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Sexual assault, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Addiction, Antisemitism, Blood, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Grief, Mental illness, Religious bigotry, and Terminal illness
Minor: Abortion, Confinement, Death of parent, Forced institutionalization, Genocide, Gore, Homophobia, Misogyny, Murder, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Self harm, Sexism, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Violence, Vomit, and Xenophobia
Specific trigger warning for a deep reflection on the trauma of child sexual assault/a sexual"relationship" a 16 year old girl had with a middle aged married man (reflecting from years later) in the story, "The Revenant"
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