RaveTor.com... the idea that what lies behind us, in newspapers, and photographs, textbooks and personal memories, is not just fiction. It is, instead, a fluid and magical text, a spellbook from which our futures are conjured. Burning Girls plays out this thesis over the course of thirteen stories that feel almost excavated, hauled out from deep and sometimes quite dark places. The result is a diverse haul of gems that draw from everything from real-world history to personal memory, eldritch fairy tales to eerie modern metaphors. Like all things dug out from darkness, there is ugliness aplenty to be found here—but there is incredible beauty too, found in works both raw and refined ... The real diamonds in the collection appear when Schanoes takes history-as-fairytale almost literally, digging her hands into painful public history and kneading out fantasies that feel breathtakingly real. The inherited trauma of Jewish history proves to be particularly fertile territory ... Burning Girls maintains an engagingly toothy weirdness throughout its length that always lures the reader in to some deeper reckoning ... The fiery coal at its center might be an agonizing loss, a terminal condition, mental illness, or a bad decision. But whatever it is, Schanoes is always intent on revealing the ugly and utterly magnetic thing that set her girls (and sometimes boys) on fire. The resulting flames, the words that lick their way off the page, are always painful ... And sometimes they are destructive and murderous, almost akin to a physical and psychological autopsy—indelible, but awash in a single color.
