July 18, 2022
Soto (The Weightless World) returns with an imaginative and otherworldly collection. In “Ocelots,” a fatherless high school kid misses out on a party in the Indiana Dunes after his mother forces him to join her on a mysterious trip to Texas. In “YA,” two bookish juniors at a magnet school in Chicago find their bond tested during their involvement in a literary AI project, which eventually writes a book about their lives. In the title story, a period piece set in Philadelphia on the eve of the 1918 flu epidemic, a 19-year-old domestic helper named Hanna Schröder works at an estate, where her father, Abel, is a tailor. Abel has lately been lying low because of the flu, and Bingham Tomlin, a WWI veteran who lost his arm in the war and is impatient to get back his mended uniform, breaks into Hanna and Abel’s house when he thinks it’s empty. In these well-crafted stories, Soto evocatively shows how the characters are at turns mystified by inexplicable experiences or haunted by burdensome pasts. Bingham, for example, becomes so trapped in memories of 1918 and WWI while visiting Hanna’s father decades later that he must, as Soto writes, “run through the front door in search of 1941.” Readers will be enriched by the way this work thoroughly investigates the human heart. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit, Assoc.
July 15, 2022
A collection of ghost stories in which the ghosts are imagined, metaphorical, and sometimes even real. In "Wren & Riley," a group of friends reunite after one of them kills her abusive husband in self-defense. But when they spend the night at her isolated home in Wyoming, they discover that death wasn't enough to keep him away. In "Immanuel," an enslaved Black boy grows up intertwined in an intense friendship with the White boy whose family holds him captive, but as the Civil War drags on, all illusions about the true nature of their relationship fall away. In "Sleepy Things," Magdalena worries about her adult son's relationship with his comatose girlfriend, when suddenly the girlfriend starts visiting Magdalena in her dreams. Soto's new collection, as suggested by its subtitle, explores ghosts. Or, rather, hauntings, which may or may not involve literal ghosts. In "Death on Mars," for instance, after a person dies, their personal AI starts to carry on in their place, a haunting that doesn't feel very different than a ghost simply because it's carried out by a computer. Similarly, in "The Prize," two writers plan to use a dead man's identity to publish their own work but find it makes them feel less real themselves. Sometimes Soto drifts a bit too far into metaphorical territory in those more realistic stories or waits until the very end to provide clarity. But where there is a more direct approach, as in "Immanuel," "Sleepy Things," and the title story (which does feature literal ghosts), his well-drawn characters with their nuanced battles with grief and hope shine brighter. Haunting and complex if uneven.
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