Alexandra Pierce Reviews Kindling by Kathleen Jennings and Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott
Kindling, Kathleen Jennings (Small Beer Press 9-781-61873-217-0, $28.00, 288pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Kathleen Jennings.
In Kindling, the first collection of her short stories, Kathleen Jennings populates wild and fantastical places with folk looking for purpose, getting lost, and finding trouble. Jennings’s stories range from variations on fairy tales (Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty), to high-seas adventure (but in the air); from an epic quest to an intimate story told by a family as they’re facing certain death.
Many of the stories are set in obviously unreal places: where airships require weatherfinders, spirits carry messages, and birds can be godparents. Others take place in what might be our world, but slightly askew: streets can change and become a maze, undines and boggarts interact with humans, and there’s magic in the city if only you’re able to see it. The characters within the stories are wholly real, though, even when they’re not entirely human. Artists seek fulfillment, families seek to protect one another, and sometimes just surviving is all that can be expected. The quest for purpose is an overarching theme, and helps bring the characters to life, with a brass man whose life goes in a different direction from what he expected, a young woman who goes adventuring to save her grandmother, and a poisoner whose intentions are nearly thwarted.
‘‘Annie Coal’’ is original to the collection, and is one of my favorites. Annie lives in a remote part of the world with her father and grandmother. When her grandmother sickens, she must leave her home and find the one person who might be able to help; when she returns, everything (and nothing) has changed. A familiar story, certainly; the joy is in the telling, with Jennings’ evocative turns of phrase bringing to life a world of almost-magic and characters who are far more than they seem, and whose delight is in family. This is one of the more joyous and hopeful stories in the collection; I hope it gets recognized come awards time. Another favorite, with a completely different tone, is ‘‘Undine Love’’, first published in 2011. Tori Damson has taken over a rural property, complete with a bed-and-breakfast business, but her main task is keeping track of – and dealing with – invasive species. It’s a very Australian story; I could almost smell the eucalyptus and dust coming off the page. Rather than foxes and rabbits, Tori is dealing with invasives of the cryptozoological kind, and her guest Jack Albury finds himself entangled in their traps. Unlike ‘‘Annie Coal’’, this is not a story with a lot of joy; nor is there much hope. Rather, life just keeps on; people make mistakes, brothers are annoying, we do what we must.
Two other excellent stories illuminate the collection as a whole. The short ‘‘Ella and the Flame’’ is the most intimate of the stories, taking place almost entirely within the house of a small family – three sisters and one daughter – who tell a great story together as their house is about to be burnt down around them by confused and angry neighbors. From such an outline it seems surprising that there could be hope in the story, but there is: in the love shown by the sisters, in the story-within-the-story, and in Ella’s ambiguous fate. Meanwhile, ‘‘Not to be Taken’’ is a deeply troubling story, with overtones of Bluebeard. Lucinda has a plan for her life; she finds someone to marry and start a family with, according to that plan. Lucinda also collects poison bottles, befriends crows, and has a mysterious past that gradually becomes clearer. Her husband, too, has his mysteries, and a plan that is in opposition to Lucinda’s. It’s a powerful story, but not an especially pleasant one.
These are not, overall, happy stories. Many have moments of happiness; others do not. There is no story that is overwhelmingly joyous, or that even ends on an unambiguously happy note. This is not to suggest that the collection is unremittingly dark, though. About half the stories share a common thread of hope: terrible things happen, but hope exists – for a better future, for positive change, for individuals or society – and deserves to be held onto. The other stories don’t even allow for that; they are wonderful, absorbing stories, thanks to Jennings’ beguiling prose, but they may leave the reader in that peculiar state that requires staring out of windows feeling tragic.
Kindling is the sort of collection to read slowly. The stories are varied, and to read it too quickly – to allow them to run into each other, to lose track of what world you’re in – would be an injustice. But sinking into each story, to delight in the rhythms of the words and the delightful worlds created: That’s giving this collection what it deserves.
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, GennaRose Nethercott (Vintage 978-0-59331-418-0, $17.00, 272pp, tp) February 2024. Cover by Kelly Louise Judd.
In her first collection of short stories, GennaRose Nethercott (Thistlefoot, 2022) writes from a sometimes foreboding, sometimes grimly humorous, perspective. Her stories confront the difficulties of relationships – friendship, lovers, family; they’re often set in small towns, and feature the magical or supernatural or just plain weird.
The collection opens with one of its best stories: ‘‘Sundown at the Eternal Staircase’’. The Eternal Staircase is a small-town attraction which defies understanding – it’s unclear whether it has a top or a bottom, and there are warnings throughout the story about the dangers inherent in visiting it (‘‘Do not remain in the Eternal Staircase for more than three consecutive hours’’). The story revolves around June and Harebell, both working at the Staircase, both aware of the risks inherent in working there. Harebell is willing to take those risks, while June is reluctant. At heart it’s a story of small-town love and friendship and loss, complicated by the weird, and it’s beautiful.
Then there’s the deeply creepy and troubling ‘‘Homebody’’. After moving in with her artist boyfriend, a woman starts to turn into a house; this isn’t unusual, it happens sometimes, and sometimes it’s reversible, but often not. The story felt like a play on discussions involving Sarah Rees Brennan and others of girls falling in love with houses in gothic novels, but with an even more troubling outcome: women physically manifesting domesticity, generally for a partner’s sake; and then being stuck, without a voice, and without knowing they used to be different. As I said, deeply creepy and troubling.
Quite different from all of the other stories here is ‘‘The Thread Boy’’: a witch wants a child, so he gathers spools of thread and makes a boy. This is the only story not focused on women, and it’s one of the few stories that features travel – the others take place almost entirely in one place. When the Thread Boy leaves home to experience different places and people, he leaves a thread with the people he connects with. There’s a similarity here with ‘‘Homebody’’, in the physical manifestations of desire and connection; however, while the Boy does become entangled in the threads, unable to move, he ultimately chooses to stay that way, because he can feel everyone he knows through the threads, and that’s a worthwhile place to be.
Rounding out my favourites from the collection are two stories about adolescents meddling with magic. ‘‘Possessions’’ sees three friends deciding to use witchcraft for the first time, in order to find a missing friend. They kill a rooster, hoping its blood will give them answers, but the spell fails. And then the rooster comes back to life, and tracks the friends down, and speaks to them. More than being about magic, this is a story about friendship – what lengths would you go to for a lost friend? – but also the realities of loss: how soon is too soon to ‘‘get over’’ grief? Secondly, there’s ‘‘A Diviner’s Abecedarian’’, which is told through an ABC of divining methods (like natimancy – divination by buttocks; or rhabdomancy – divination by sticks or wands). A group of schoolgirls do terrible things to schoolmates through their various methods of divination. It can be a risky style choice, working though the alphabet like this, but here it absolutely works. We never learn the names of the girls, just some of their defining attributes; I know that they are creepy as anything and I don’t want to mess with them.
In Thistlefoot, Nethercott brought the Baba Yaga story to modern America, in a story about Yaga’s descendants inheriting her house. These short stories have a similar fairytale sensibility. Throughout Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart I was reminded of Angela Slatter’s work. Both are writing fairy tales on the grimmer side – not just for the sake of it, but because that’s the way life can be, in the vagaries of love and yearning. There’s a focus on women and their relationships that’s also reminiscent, as well as the sometimes-blurry line between ‘‘is this story a warning, or an encouragement?’’
I was impressed by the characters, storytelling, and prose of her debut novel; these short stories further showcase Nethercott’s abilities and I’m excited to see what else she will do.
Alexandra Pierce reads, writes, podcasts, cooks and knits; she’s Australian and a feminist. She was a host of the Hugo Award winning podcast Galactic Suburbia for a decade; her new podcast is all about indie bookshops and is called Paper Defiance. Alex has edited two award-winning non-fiction anthologies, Letters to Tiptree and Luminscent Threads: Connections to Octavia E Butler. She reviews a wide range of books at www.randomalex.net.
This review and more like it in the April 2024 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.
©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.
