Review by Booklist Review
With a unique voice and a gift for metaphor, Cotman presents seven stories that blend magic realism and social commentary into a rollicking fever dream of real and imagined Black experiences. Whether it's Jim Crow--era Black parents exhorted to violence by a sinister and unearthly presence, a streetwise young man transported into his older lover's memories whenever the two touch, or a jaded former teacher attempting to run a Black Ren Faire clone, Cotman's characters confront racial and sexual insecurities and toxic relationships with bombast and emotional warfare. While supernatural landscapes and phenomena predominate, Cotman's stories tend to be grounded in Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York, where specific buildings, schools, and dining spots co-exist with fantastical "histories." In the title story, Cotman's young Black protagonists and former lovers spend a hallucinatory two days in a Boston turned surreal by an event called the Rupture; they stroll among fantastic human-animal hybrids, and gravity no longer exists, yet they can still visit the actual Lucy Parson Center and get ice cream at JP Licks. Notably, racism and racial terror continue to thrive in this alternate universe. Despite the otherworldly dangers, the only warning characters receive is to avoid the wharf where "White boys . . . Mark Wahlberg types" congregate. An astounding collection from a rare talent.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cotman (Dance on Saturday) utilizes magical conceits and pop culture references to probe America's legacy of racism in this striking collection. In "The Switchin' Tree," set in the 1950s, a young Black boy named Jesse walks along the highway, eliciting racial slurs from white motorists. After the boy returns home, his drunken father says he's going to beat Jesse for wandering off, then hears a voice from a tree, and tells the tree he's trying to protect his son from the white lynch mobs he remembers from his own childhood. "Owen," set in the late 1990s, also deals with corporal punishment but affects a quirky vibe. In it, a Black father drives to his ex-wife's home to punish his "weird" 11-year-old son, Teddy, after learning from his ex that Teddy shoved his younger sister for teasing him about his adoration for a white pro wrestler who'd recently died in the ring. In the title story, the narrator chafes at his girlfriend's confession that she decided to date him because he reminds her of Malik, a Black cast member of the Real World ("I know I have an afro, but I'm not some hippie"). The distinctive and troubled characters make these stories stand out. Cotman's versatile talents are on full display. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Seven long short stories that call into being worlds as fantastic as they are real. As presaged by the title, the stories in Cotman's fourth collection are splendidly strange. In "Weird Black Girls," the narrator takes his ex-girlfriend on a trip to Boston, a tourist attraction ever since "the Rupture" in 1702 when "the settlement...rose like a finger pointing skyward to fix at a 45-degree angle above the earth," an event supposedly caused by a Black witch named Annalee who may still roam Cambridge's uncanny, and racist, streets. In "Things I Never Learned in Caitlin Clarke's Intro to Acting Class," the narrator takes a new lover, Leroy, only to discover that whenever they touch he's transported back in time to inhabit Leroy's body as he attends an acting class led by the real-life star of Dragonslayer. In "Tournament Arc," two life-long best friends forced out of their jobs by Covid-19 and culture wars capitalize on their shared obsession for all things anime to run a LARP tournament that attracts a spectacular cast of combatants, most notably a sentient suit of "armor from precolonial Benin." The stories are gleefully genre-busting in the style of Rion Amilcar Scott or Karen Joy Fowler, yet their invention is always grounded in the tangible struggles the characters face as they define their gender identities, their racial allegiances, and their right to be ordinary in a world that is realistically cruel. In the harrowing "Triggered," for example, a story that's markedly realist for this fabulist collection, the toxic relationship between two white Bay Area Occupy--affiliated activists unravels to reveal the depths of the destruction their performative allyship wreaks on the Black and brown communities they themselves have occupied. A reader, acclimated to the exuberant oddity that characterizes the majority of the stories, may find themselves waiting for the surrealist shoe to drop. When it does not and the story grinds to the habitual tragedy of its conclusion, the result is an epiphany about our shared American reality that is all the more startling for its brutal familiarity. Sharp, poignant, funny, and, above all, filled with the joy of invention--a must-read. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
