Samatar’s fiction embodies a beauty and complexity reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin and Angela Carter. Similarly, she uses diverse genre elements — drawing upon science fiction, myth, and the fantastic — as a means to explore ideas and offer deeper layers of stylistic intricacy ... Because the stories are so layered with ideas, a close reading can be an intensely cerebral experience; to skim the surface is to miss the story ... Samatar’s visions of the future, though diverse, are almost uniformly horrifying ... A relentless, challenging, and hypnotic collection, Sofia Samatar’s Tender transports the reader to myriad worlds, periods of history, and monstrous futures yet to be born. It can be a difficult text, demanding a high level of engagement with multiple layers and themes. At the same time, its subtle yet wrenching emotions have a way of getting under your skin.
Tender's longest story...is a feast of ideas. It's reminiscent of vintage Ursula K. Le Guin in its combination of social science and hard sci-fi, even as it probes the nature of belonging and belief ... The book's beating heart, though, is its title story...'Tender' redefines the emotional power and literary heft that speculative fiction can convey. As does Tender as a whole.
Samatar, though she employs artful and often poetic prose, is paradoxically direct in her approach. Whether she is marrying mythologies to modern scenarios ('How I Met the Ghoul') or writing about a dystopian near-future ('How to Get Back to the Forest'), she renders her characters with an unvarnished honesty. She also illustrates her settings in broad sweeps of careful detail, giving the reader a solid and coherent sense of the world the tale takes place in without fail. The only stories in this collection that do not work are the stories where this balance collapses and the direct gives way to the opaque ... I’d strongly recommend giving the literary, clever, and productive art that Samatar has collected here a read. It’s as good as I’d hoped, and just as smart too.
