Homesick, Nino Cipri's debut short story collection, is weird in the best ways. These stories take readers to the edge of understanding and leave them there to figure it out. Each of the nine stories centers on LGBTQ+ characters and relationships; a large part of their appeal is that queerness is normal and everything else is off.
In "A Silly Love Story," two trans friends spark a romance while trying to communicate with the possibly benevolent poltergeist living in one character's closet. A quiz to find out "Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You?" is fun and creepy; each set of answers (A, B, C or D) can be read as a different story of death, resurrection, revenge or heroism. In "The Shape of My Name," a young woman cleans out the home she grew up in while it changes and shrinks around her. Furniture and rooms disappear as the young woman's mother fades away in a hospital, and although she makes a choice before the house is completely gone, the ending remains ambiguous.
The longest of the stories, settling in at 70 pages, follows three friends who become estranged after events surrounding their discovery of two giant weasel skeletons and evidence of the weasels' written language. Cipri's Native archeologist wants the bones reburied now that they've been studied, while the two academics want to put everything into a museum. Meanwhile, the primary narrator--one of the academics--has sold documentary rights to a television network trying to push the idea of "space weasels."
Since it's a collection of stories, Homesick offers many stopping points. Like unraveling the mysteries of prehistoric intelligent weasels, however, stopping proves to be quite impossible. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels