She Treads Softly: Orange World and Other Stories

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Orange World and Other Stories

Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell
Knopf Doubleday: 5/14/19
eBook review copy; 288 pages
ISBN-13: 9780525656135

Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell is a very highly recommended collection of eight short stories.
This remarkable, memorable collection is impressive in both the writing and the story telling. Russell captures basic human truths and presents them in her curious tales. The well-written, off-beat stories have a basis in magic realism and make the bizarre seem normal. They can be strangely funny while also deeply emotional. The whole collection is truly reminiscent of Twilight Zone episodes.

The stories include:
The Prospectors: Two young women who call themselves the prospectors have an unforgettable night at a mountain lodge.
The Bad Graft: A woman becomes the host of the spirit of a Joshua Tree.
Bog Girl: A first romance blossoms between a young man and a girl he found buried in the peat of a bog.
Madame Bovary’s Greyhound: The inner thoughts and devotion of a young greyhound and her fickle mistress.
The Tornado Auction: A retired tornado farmer decides to take a chance and risk it all on raising one more tornado.
Black Corfu: A doctor whose job is to make sure the dead stay dead.
The Gondoliers: Four sisters who call themselves the Gondoliers, use echolocation by singing in order to navigate while poling people through the canals of New Florida
Orange World: A new mother made a pact for the safety of her baby and is now breast feeding the devil.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.