Stories as well executed as these are their own reward, but it’s also clear from the capaciousness on display here that Ms. Beams has novels’ worth of worlds inside her.
Clare Beams’ voice rings true throughout her masterful first collection ... Cannily, she covers more than one base, appealing to readers who prefer disjointed, otherworldly scenarios and those who like their fiction grounded in recognizable reality. She also ensures that every situation or flourish, fantastic or otherwise, is infused with or informed by credible human instincts and emotion ... Beams’ collection skillfully and alluringly navigates the border between the familiar and the unexpected, and beguiles and unsettles in equal measure.
Beams entire collection bewitches—and features complex female characters and feminist takes on broader themes to boot. A sharp eye for detail and an appreciation for emotional nuance underpin Beams’ ability to captivate readers, even as she eschews neat endings in favor of mysteries that linger into discomfort.
...[a] lush, imaginative debut ... By making her metaphors literal, Beams creates magical-realist pieces that often calculate the high cost of being a woman ... even when their plots feel slightly didactic, these stories are constructed from gorgeous, finely fashioned sentences. Beams’ flair and originality, and her ability to make sense of the objects of the world, are striking.
Imaginative, unsettling and relentlessly sharp, the nine stories of the book are full of immersive detail and fully realized narrators that give believability to the fantastic ... Taken individually, each story in We Show What We Have Learned” tends to be an uncomfortably close look at the interior lives of people struggling to make sense of themselves and those around them. Ms. Beams’ style favors ambiguous endings, which may frustrate some readers who would prefer clearer resolutions. The author’s embrace of uncertainty and the otherworldly, however, makes this collection a devastating illustration of the trajectories our lives can take, for better or worse, and the relative powerlessness an individual has to alter those trajectories.
