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A review by mia_difelice
This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks
4.0
After reading "Zolaria," the first story in this collection, I knew I wanted to pick up the collection and I was not disappointed. Caitlin Horrocks' This Is Not Your City left me feeling raw and heavy. The book is expansive in setting, moving from Estonia to Finland to Greece to small-town Michigan. But even more striking are the characters. This is not a showy collection; Horrocks' language is simple, at times sparse; the narration is straight-forward, taking no leaps and bounds in structure or form; some of the plots feel unresolved or static; and the voices of the narrator sometimes blend together. But what Horrocks does so well is character. This Is Not Your City becomes intense in strangely subtle and unexpected way through her protagonists. She deftly captures fear and anxiety and makes the reader share in them. She captures the specifics that make a person's thoughts/memories real and vital -- and she illuminates the little, uncanny things that have the most unexpected consequences on how we feel and act. The inner worlds of her characters are dense, richly textured, and I felt fully immersed in each one.
My favorites of the stories were "At the Zoo," exploring the relationships between grandfather, mother, and son in the wake of a grandmother's death; and "The Lion's Gate," about a middle-aged solo traveller in Greece who strikes a bright, fleeting relationship with a wayward backpacking youth. Other standouts were "Zero Conditional," "World Champion of the Cow Insane," "In the Gulf of Aden," and "Steal Small."
My favorites of the stories were "At the Zoo," exploring the relationships between grandfather, mother, and son in the wake of a grandmother's death; and "The Lion's Gate," about a middle-aged solo traveller in Greece who strikes a bright, fleeting relationship with a wayward backpacking youth. Other standouts were "Zero Conditional," "World Champion of the Cow Insane," "In the Gulf of Aden," and "Steal Small."