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the four ultimate dorky stages 💗👌🌈
Got a few treats at Labyrinth Books
A woman slowly dissolves into mist, a chef bound for Mars embarks upon an even more treacherous journey, and a cyclops searches for love online--just three of the eleven stories in Ramona Ausubel’s new collection of stories, Awayland, now available from Riverhead Books.
Awayland - Ramona Ausubel
Summary: A cyclops makes a dating profile, a young woman’s mother begins to disappear, two exes decide to have a child together, and more in this collection of short stories
Quote: “They come here to marvel, but sometimes they find out what the people who live here already know: no amount of beauty will keep you alive forever.”
My rating: 3.5/5.0 Goodreads: 3.58/5.0
Review: The stories are infused with a dreamy sadness. They mainly are about things happening to people, which puts the realism in magical realism, but also makes some of the stories meander. Despite the varying levels of realism, the collection does feel cohesive and well-thought through. It just didn’t knock my socks off. My favorite stories were “Template for a Proclamation to Save the Species”, where a mayor devises a plan to increase the population of his town, and “Club Zeus”, where a teenager working as a storyteller at an all-inclusive resort witness a death.
Outside the window the people, the poor war-battered and future-looking people, were just trying to enjoy a day in the sunshine. They were being good, trying hard. The girl thought about rewarding them, throwing chocolate coins or confetti down.
...
The girl threw another rose. A man picked it up, squinted up into the sky, and the woman and the girl could tell that he did not see them this high. The mother and her daughter were nothing more than strange weather.
Awayland
By Ramona Ausubel.
Book design by Gretchen Achilles.
Half of me wants to follow a handsome sheepherder across a mountain range, and half of me never wants to leave my apartment.
Ramona Ausubel, Awayland
Tom thinks about a designated sex day [...] Everyone will get a day off, and they will stay home, and they will screw.
Ramona Ausubel, Awayland
