Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Fortunately, things pick up again beginning with "Lily Glass," a piercing variation on "Snow-White and Rose-Red" about an early film starlet navigating a complex maze of anti-Semitism, homophobia, and repressed desire, and culminating with the masterful Shirley Jackson Award–winning title story, which follows a gifted young witch and her seamstress sister as they escape the 1906 Bialystok pogrom to hoped-for safety in New York.Īn ambitious but uneven collection from a writer of significant talent and promise.Ī fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit. "Rats," a retelling of the calamitous relationship between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spurgeon, again starts off compellingly, examining the essential lie at the heart of fiction and our impulse to impose narrative order on the chaos of life, only to fall apart in an unpalatable take on the inevitable end, pegging Lily (Nancy's stand-in) as not only responsible for her own murder, but desirous of it.
Despite this strong start, the collection begins to sag toward the middle, notably at the end of "Emma Goldman Takes Tea With the Baba Yaga." What begins as a captivating examination of the ways narrative choices, including state propaganda, affect perception and outcome, with the narrator imagining Goldman making a renewed commitment to revolution in the Baba Yaga's forest cottage following her disillusionment with the Bolshevik state, suddenly fizzles into a direct accounting of the United States' recent slide toward fascism. In "Phosphorus," an Irish girl laboring in a London match factory falls ill with a ghastly disease but, thanks to a heartbreaking bargain, is able to see the workers' strike for better conditions through to the end. In the powerful "Among the Thorns," Ittele, a Jewish girl eschewing the trajectory typical for a 17th-century woman, dedicates herself instead-with intercession from an ancient, neglected deity-to taking revenge on the fiddler who was responsible for her father's humiliation and murder. History and fairy tales are reimagined, repurposed, and remixed in this intriguing debut story collection.ĭrawing deeply from history (particularly leftist, labor, women's, and Jewish history), folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture, Schanoes explores themes of historiography, queerness, duty, justice, and oppression.
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