Glorious Frazzled Beings
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Home is where we love, suffer, and learn. Some homes we chose, others are inflicted upon us, and still others are bodies we are born into. In this astounding collection of stories, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home.
Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children’s clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting mother must sift through her ancestors’ gifts and the complexities of love when one boy is born with a beautiful set of fox ears and another is not. In the wake of her elderly mother’s tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind. And a man named Pooka finds new ways to weave new stories into his abode, in spite of his inherited suffering.
A startling and beguiling story collection, Glorious Frazzled Beings is a love song to the homes we make, keep, and break.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Spirits and oddities roam through the pages of these stunning, otherworldly short stories. Split into four parts—“Homemaking,” “Housekeeping,” “Home Breaking,” “Homing”—Angélique Lalonde’s collection is chock-full of fantastical phenomena, like boys with fox ears, ladies with giant heads, tiny ghosts, and secret pets. These strange wanderers inhabit a world separate from our own but similar enough to make even the most surreal moments feel grounded in reality. In one short, short story, the narrator’s father finds a dying leopard in the family’s bathroom and throws a mat over it, simply pretending it’s not there. Does the cat represent our suffering environment, or is it just another source of bizarre dark humour in Lalonde’s odd universe? Captivating, raw, and often very funny, these stories are literary fiction with the soul and immediacy of familiar folktales.
