Asja Bakić writes with rare wit about lust, love, science, the climate disaster, time travel ... This is an equal parts weird and skillfully witty collection and very much worth the read.
The stories also, each and every one of them, follow their own internal rules. Nothing from the world of one story could be relied on when entering another. Each one was a capsule, each one its own universe ... We see some of Bakić’s dry humor rear its head ... This book felt like Bakić was scraping my insides for material, like I opened a book and was confronted with dead skin I’d shed my whole life, turned back to me asking me to answer for the sins in my thoughts and the flaws in my hopes and the depravity in my dreams. In these stories, the fantastic is a dark mirror of our basest desires that looks back at us, giving us just what we want, regardless of the consequences.
Daring, imaginative ... Several pieces have the shadowy, unsettling quality of fairy tales ... Throughout this wide-ranging collection, sly humor accents the penetrating observations ... The dystopian stories collected in Sweetlust raise piercing, inventive questions that transcend place and time, leading to reflections on contemporary experiences. Here, intelligent, resourceful heroines learn to endure and even rise above their grim circumstances—whether or not survival is enough.
The stories exist in an introspective space, the world sketched out only where it directly involves the narrators ... All are filled with a satisfying energy.
Delightful and offbeat ... Though the concepts are provocative, some of the science fiction details are a bit too simplistic or vague ... When it works, this cabinet of curiosities is intriguingly bizarre.
