Review of Send Her Back and Other Stories
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Eren Hanbury
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- Latest Review: Send Her Back and Other Stories by Munashe Kaseke
Review of Send Her Back and Other Stories
[Following is a volunteer review of "Send Her Back and Other Stories" by Munashe Kaseke.]
Send Her Back and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen short stories by Zimbabwean author Munashe Kaseke. The stories detail aspects of what it’s like being on the inside of being an outcast: in one’s own country, in one’s family, as a woman, a person of colour and, mostly, as an immigrant in America.
I appreciated the brash honesty of these stories, which contrast beautifully with the writer’s elegant writing style. There is a flow to how each narrative unfolds and I was quickly caught up in the turmoil and struggles of the book’s various protagonists. The characters were believable and the dialogue well executed. I enjoyed the writing.
Recurring themes in the book include the stereotyping and sense of superiority encountered by so-called immigrants in an immigrant society, the burden on individual family members to rescue kin from hardship, and, the complex lot of the girl-child, the sister, the mother and the lover waking up on the wrong side of patriarchy. There is a relentlessness to how these struggles are portrayed and I found that I could only manage reading one or two stories a day. While there are a few lighthearted moments that break through the bleakness, these are quite rare. The lack of merriment in the book does not detract from the competence or compelling storytelling though; there are other real problems unfortunately, that do.
I found the compilation to be very poorly edited. The typographical and stylistic errors are just too plentiful for comfort. As a short story compilation, the book furthermore lacks a certain thematic restraint and cohesiveness. Near-identical themes play out in the narrative and character development of these disparate stories, in similar ways. It’s as though the stories are (unconsciously) attempting to exorcise the same demon, over and over again. This thematic repetitiveness does a grave injustice to the otherwise imaginative storytelling. I was also annoyed with descriptive detail that undermined the delicate nuances and subtext of the dialogue. Finally, I found that too many of the endings to the stories were flat and disappointing. Conclusions do not, by any means, have to be neatly resolved narratively but they do have to be satisfying. These conclusions felt thematically incomplete. The book’s flaws might all point to the overall impression I get that what these fractured stories really wanted to be was one short novella.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
******
Send Her Back and Other Stories
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Send Her Back and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen short stories by Zimbabwean author Munashe Kaseke. The stories detail aspects of what it’s like being on the inside of being an outcast: in one’s own country, in one’s family, as a woman, a person of colour and, mostly, as an immigrant in America.
I appreciated the brash honesty of these stories, which contrast beautifully with the writer’s elegant writing style. There is a flow to how each narrative unfolds and I was quickly caught up in the turmoil and struggles of the book’s various protagonists. The characters were believable and the dialogue well executed. I enjoyed the writing.
Recurring themes in the book include the stereotyping and sense of superiority encountered by so-called immigrants in an immigrant society, the burden on individual family members to rescue kin from hardship, and, the complex lot of the girl-child, the sister, the mother and the lover waking up on the wrong side of patriarchy. There is a relentlessness to how these struggles are portrayed and I found that I could only manage reading one or two stories a day. While there are a few lighthearted moments that break through the bleakness, these are quite rare. The lack of merriment in the book does not detract from the competence or compelling storytelling though; there are other real problems unfortunately, that do.
I found the compilation to be very poorly edited. The typographical and stylistic errors are just too plentiful for comfort. As a short story compilation, the book furthermore lacks a certain thematic restraint and cohesiveness. Near-identical themes play out in the narrative and character development of these disparate stories, in similar ways. It’s as though the stories are (unconsciously) attempting to exorcise the same demon, over and over again. This thematic repetitiveness does a grave injustice to the otherwise imaginative storytelling. I was also annoyed with descriptive detail that undermined the delicate nuances and subtext of the dialogue. Finally, I found that too many of the endings to the stories were flat and disappointing. Conclusions do not, by any means, have to be neatly resolved narratively but they do have to be satisfying. These conclusions felt thematically incomplete. The book’s flaws might all point to the overall impression I get that what these fractured stories really wanted to be was one short novella.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
******
Send Her Back and Other Stories
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Latest Review: Send Her Back and Other Stories by Munashe Kaseke
