Showcases Li's gift for dialogue and her deep understanding of human connection ... Compassion, coupled with Li's gorgeous prose and painstaking attention to detail, is what makes these stories so beautiful, so accomplished. This is a perfect collection by a writer at the top of her game, and a heart-wrenching look at how loss changes not only the bereaved, but their entire existence.
Another triumphant, if more oblique, excavation of aging ... Though a virtuoso in more traditional, omniscient third-person narration, Li is at her finest in the modern, first-person register of the final story ... This fascinating discontinuity between inner and outer lives reminds the reader that the best short fiction, even when it comments on the world at large, operates most powerfully on the level of the individual characters — complicating their visions of themselves and clarifying our understanding of the behavior that great pain makes possible.
Although each of the stories in Wednesday’s Child can be found online through the publications in which they were originally published, it’s fortunate for readers that they have come together in this collection, perhaps the most compelling yet.
Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality ... Li’s storytelling here is gradual, accretive, often refusing to settle into any kind of expected focus.
The stories in Wednesday’s Child take as their subject the state of motherhood: its weight and its potency; the questions it raises, and the sacrifices and sublimations it exacts ... Haunting, harrowing tales ... If there’s hope to be taken from these bruising, beautiful tales, it’s in the fact that, despite all of this, the protagonists choose to carry on.
It is...a fragile optimism, and Ms. Li’s art is in revealing glimpses of the shadows underneath it without hauling them to the surface, like darkness glimpsed beneath a crust of ice ... In this strange and distinctive collection, garrulity is a cover for a deeper speechlessness and hope is a disguise for fatalism.
In this exquisite collection of 11 stories, the immigrant experience is exponentially complicated by a far more commonplace predicament: having to care for children.
