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What I Didn't See: Stories (2002)

by Karen Joy Fowler(Favorite Author)

3.87 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1931520682 (ISBN13: 9781931520683)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Small Beer Press

review 1: This falls somewhere around three and a half stars for me, but I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because I didn't read it in my medium of choice. While I'm now okay with the occasional ebook, I don't think it's the ideal medium for short story collections. I want to be able to choose which story to read next. I want to be able to glance back at the title of the story I just read as soon as I'm done, because proper titling is an art form. I want to be able to glance at the credits and see where each story was originally published. The list of credits appeared only at the end, and then I had to navigated the clunky table of contents all over again to try to figure out which stories had been published in which markets, since I had not managed to connect the titles with t... morehe stories. I'm now left trying to figure out why Asimov's published a couple of stories that I would not have recalled as speculative. A lot of these stories didn't really sit on the SF spectrum for me, but somewhere adjacent to it, like Fowler's early novels. I thought the second half of the collection was stronger than the first: the title story, with its riff on the life of Alice Sheldon, is excellent, and the fairy tale that I believe was called "Halfway People," and the short but poignant "King Rat." The last one reminds me of everything that I loved in her earlier collections, and why I always buy a magazine or anthology when I see that one of her stories is in it. Her novels have wandered a little from my taste, but her short fiction is masterful.
review 2: Fowler's stories are shrewd and unsettling, and I couldn't help feeling slightly tense and off-kilter as I eagerly read through each. Many in the collection seem ethnographical in nature--an insider's look at a cult, an archeological dig, a research expedition in the Congo, the family of John Wilkes Booth. Fowler's range is wide and her characters, settings, and conflicts diverse, but her stories hang together in "What I Didn't See" by the underlying theme of disappearance: those who disappear on purpose, those who are taken away against their will, and those who are found. A very satisfying story collection! less

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