The Privilege of the Happy Ending

Starred review from August 21, 2023
Hugo and Nebula award winner Johnson (The River Bank) returns with 14 dazzling speculative shorts. The collection opens with an altered photograph: Ukulele Squid Girl by Laura Christensen, which depicts a young girl with tentacles holding a ukulele. The first story, “Tool-Using Mimics,” provides a series of possible explanations for how such a girl came to be—is she the determined child of an octopus that grew into a small girl through sheer force of will? Or perhaps the result of the wayward desires of a fisherman’s wife? “Butterflies of Eastern Texas” brings unexpected color to the dull, repetitive life of a train conductor when he meets a passenger who involuntarily releases butterflies from her mouth every time she speaks. In “Ratatoskr,” a young girl learns about death when she spies the Norse squirrel god outside her window during a storm and gains the ability to see and communicate with squirrel ghosts. The devastating title tale follows another young girl and her cherished talking hen as they barely escape a swarm of monsters who devour anything with flesh. Johnson’s keen eye for the mysteries of human nature shines as her characters experience love, loss, growth, and betrayal, all made delightfully strange. These boundary-pushing, magic-infused tales are sure to wow.

September 1, 2023
In her memorable, third short-story collection (following At the Mouth of the River of Bees, 2012), Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Johnson delivers 14 stories with a distinctly anthropomorphic flair, with numerous entries featuring animal protagonists or characters who straddle an amorphous border between animal and human or animal and the divine. The result is sometimes disturbing ("Mantis Wives"), sometimes charming ("The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall"), and sometimes both at once ("Tool-Using Mimics"). Johnson experiments with form and breaking the fourth wall throughout, challenging readers to experience short fiction in new ways, and is particularly successful in the standout closing story from which the collection draws its title, in which a young girl and a talking hen seek safety from waves of ravening monsters, while the story's narrator slyly interjects to point out how narrative choices are influencing the reader's perceptions. A thought-provoking array of curiosities that will appeal to fans of Ben Loory's Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (2011), Laline Paull's The Bees (2014), and Monstress (2016), by Marjorie Liu.

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