It is intellectually exhilarating and emotionally devastating. The reader is harmoniously engaged on three levels: with a fictional character, with the mind of the writer, and with one’s own experience.
The conflicts in these stories, regardless of setting or fabulist magic, coalesce into the larger narrative that is always unfolding on earth: the fight for existence, life beginning and inevitably ending.
These stories are alternately funny and distressing, and while she’s aware that this sort of thing has been tried before... Dovey conjures new ways of thinking about species that are subject to humanity’s whims.
The collection raises serious philosophical questions, but it also exhibits, in every story, Dovey’s delight in meeting the imaginative challenge she has set herself.
