Though many of the stories verge on the dark or twisty side of things, there really is a strong sense of playfulness throughout. It’s like watching shadow children frolic, or sprites dance, things that are having fun but can also devour you whole.
Author Archives: Elisabeth Ring
‘Beautiful’ Unflinchingly Humanizes the Invisible Cost of Modern Life
It’s one thing to understand that the status quo demands a human cost in some far-off corner of some anonymous country. It’s another to put faces and stories to that cost, and to see how steep that cost really is, and how our culture is complicit to it.
‘Want Me’ A Look at Sexual Desire Buffered with Kindness
This isn’t a titillating read, but that doesn’t mean that it’s an easy one. Yet the rawness of her recollection was as compelling as it was hard to read, turning Want Me into a thought-provoking exploration into a single person’s experience that looks much too familiar for even someone far outside of her singular experience.
‘Child’ a Powerful Glimpse into ‘Invisible’ Lives
It’s not easy to read about children being abused and neglected, or about prevalent drug use, or the conditions in shelters that are only tolerable because the shelters beat the alternative. Invisible Child, though, was never meant to be easy reading.
‘North Woods’ A Puzzlebox of a Story
Even in its more intricate and obtuse moments, North Woods quickly links itself back to its original purpose: to tell the story of one fictional geographic location through the ages.
‘Panda Killer’ a Story of New Starts and Hard Truths
The story is plenty heavy but never unbearable. And there are moments of levity, and of hope, and joy, for both Jane and Phúc, even as their circumstances make life a little darker for them than for others.
‘True Account’ Combines the Ordinary and Wonderous
I’ve enjoyed reading more collections pushing boundaries—topically or in form, or both—but The True Account of Myself as a Bird is a much more meditative and deceptively simpler animal that has left me with a greater appreciation for the seemingly ordinary things around me.
‘Gifted School’ a Tale of Parents Behaving Badly
This is a book about disproportionate freak-outs over where children go to school when the worst of all possible options is still far better than most people have access to. We’ve seen far more drastic and public bad behavior for the same thing getting the criminal effect of a slap on the wrist.
‘Whalefall’ a Better Drama Than Thriller
Whalefall is billed as a survival thriller like The Martian, but that creates some false expectations. This is a criticism more of the marketing of this book than the book itself, because what the book actually is, is a novel-length version of the “Men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme.
‘Foul’ a Tale of Revenge as Bloody as the Bard’s
There’s something transgressive to watching this fast-paced, consequence-lite rampage. What makes it feminist is perhaps the freedom these four female characters feel in behaving badly—a realm that the male characters felt entitled to do before their bloody ends.
Ring Reads 