Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake) is back with a collection of stories filled with magical realism and imbued with the stuff of fairy tales.
The collection is uneven, which means that there is likely something here for every taste. If you prefer a straightforward story with a narrative arc and a conclusion at its conclusion, try "The Doctor and the Rabbi." The Rabbi is a woman, teacherly and expressive; the Doctor is a literalist by his own admission. Their conversation seems to be circular, going nowhere, but it most assuredly does: "He could feel it, just feel it, the glimmer of something he did not understand." That something will doubtless bring them together again and again. A discussion about prayer midway through this story is purely wonderful.
If you are willing to follow Bender into the mystical, there are several choices. "The Color Master" is a retelling of the first part of the Charles Perrault tale "Donkeyskin," which has echoes of "Cinderella." In this version, however, the king wants to marry his daughter. The tailors who create beautiful dresses for the princess finally encourage her to get away. "Soon after the Princess got the third dress, she left town," the Color Master says. "The rest I do not know. The rest of the story--known, I'm told, as 'Donkeyskin'--is hers."
In "Tiger Mending," one of two sisters is an expert seamstress pressed into service to sew tigers back together when they appear bloodied and ragged; how they got that way is the crux of the story. "Lemonade" is a heartrending story about adolescent girls at a mall, set in Southern California at its bitchy best. "The Red Ribbon" has a wife negotiating a price with her husband for every sexual act and finding that she can't go back to an ordinary sex life. The poignant ending finds them both "on their way to leaving already, that this conversation was only a walking through a door already open...."
Each story is a wonder in its own right. Bender's imagination stops at nothing, no matter how fantastical. Occasionally, her language is jarring: lofty, literary and eloquent in one sentence, then raunchy and low in the next. It is sometimes hard to discern when the stories take place--it could be centuries ago or yesterday--which adds to their appeal. In both style and content, Bender's stories are filled with fancy and mystery; some are fairy tales for grownups, some morality plays, all of them captivating and worth reading more than once. --Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: A collection of stories, some filled with magic and mystery and some prosaic and down to earth; all written with energy and imagination.