Author: Damien Angelica Walters
Date Read: 2.March.2018
On TBR for: 8 days
TBR status after reading: 269 books to read (TBR expected to be cleared in 2036)
Format: Ebook - ePub format
Source: LibraryThing Early Reviewers
Challenges: Pace yourself; Keep things balanced
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers
"Once upon a time there was a monster. This is how they tell you the story starts. This is a lie."
So starts Cry Your Way Home, a collection of short stories by Damien Angelica Walters. These stories span from fairy tale-like to science fiction to magical realism, with the common thread of being dark, dealing with loss and grief, dealing with monsters (allegorical or not) and things that go bump in the night.
Most of the 17 stories in this collection were enjoyable - only a few didn't quite work for me. The opening story, Tooth, Tongue, and Claw, had me worried that there wouldn't be a happy ending, that that would be the tone of the entire collection. But while most of the endings are not happy, this one included, they are not grim and dark and full of hopelessness has I had feared. In most of the cases there is some kind of closure to be had.
And still speaking of endings, a few of the stories felt incomplete, like the actual story had just started and then it ended. Two others were a variation of this: they felt as the start of something great, something that I would love to read in a longer format. The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter feels like this, and so does The Floating Girls: A Documentary, but the latter still works very well as a short story and was my favourite of the book.
Although some of the stories weren't totally to my liking, I enjoyed this book. It was well written, and vivid enough to leave me with that pleasant-unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach that something terrible was about to happen.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Quotes I enjoyed:
Is a final word even important if no one hears? Is a final apology meaningful if every preceding action says otherwise?
You think it’ll kill you, but it’s a hell of a lot more clever than that because it lets you live. Only thing you can do is give it the finger and move on as best you can. Only thing anyone can do.
It’s the sort of floor on which a girl could dance a pirouette and a woman, a waltz. I do neither, afraid I might trip over my own aspirations.
Autumn, like Alzheimer’s, turns everything strange and unfamiliar, and when you look for the shape of the real hidden within, you find only a promise of the winter to come.
This is the way the world breaks you. It takes everything you know and love and turns it inside out. It leaches the color from your hair, yellows your teeth, and curves your spine, and even though you wish you were the same person you’ve always been on the inside, you go grey and stained and frail there, too.
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