RaveThe Fiction Writers Review[Toni] Morrison said she wanted to write without explaining things to white readers, that she wanted to write without apology, that she was writing to and for an African-American audience. Thompson-Spires continues that effort in this collection ... They’re the kind of stories where every object, every allusion, and every reference take on secondary and tertiary importance. My brain feels like a jostled seltzer can waiting to be cracked open ... Some of the satirical pieces seem almost too obvious at first and their targets too easy. Yet they withstand dissection and questioning. They thrive under repeated analysis such that even the few stories I’d dismissed at first grow in possibility the more I probe ... these stories never feel didactic, never feel that their sole purpose is to make broad statements about what it means to be black in America today even though they are also doing emphatically that. It’s the mode of delivery, the forms of the stories, the use of satire and humor, the meta-fictional qualities, the tone and style chosen by the author that layer the larger view over the unique nature of each story’s characters.
