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A review by doomkittiekhan
The Rock Eaters: Stories by Brenda Peynado
5.0
'The Rock Eaters' by Dominican American author Brenda Peynado is exactly the shockingly beautiful and soul-twisting debut short story collection that you need to add to your life immediately. Each tale pierced deeper into my heart and made me explore aspects of my consciousness that are easier to keep buried and overlook in our daily hustle and bustle. Through layers of fantasy, rage, horror, futuristic and suburban settings, and intimate character studies, the author fleshes out her feelings on immigration, colonialism, otherness, adolescence, cultural violence, toxic masculinity, religion, and the cost of grief and love.
The book opens with "Thoughts and Prayers", a story that immediately places readers into a familiar and yet foreign setting. In a Florida town, residents pray to the strange, harpy-like angels that perch on their roofs to keep them safe each day...literally offering them "thoughts and prayers". When the town is devastated by a school shooting, Peynado turns the volume all the way up to polarize and mobilize her characters.
Her characters are elemental and in stories like "The Drownings", "The Stones of Sorrow Lake", and "The Rock Eaters", the characters' relationship to land and water becomes intrinsically linked to their being. The children in "The Drownings" spend their time growing up in the water, exploring each others bodies, ingesting chlorine pool water through kisses and to see how long they can hold their breath and beat against the natural and powerful hold of a death by drowning. In a long corrupted rust-belt town the characters in "The Stones of Sorrow Lake" manifest craggy, rock-like tumors upon experiencing their first sorrow. These tumors grow and will eventually need to fall into the waters of Sorrow Lake where they will serve as reminders of past trauma for the inhabitants. In a place where personal tragedy is so visible it is curious to see how the characters care for each other. "The Rock Eaters" is a completely fresh portrayal of diaspora where island inhabitants begin to leave their homeland and travel through the air to places beyond the horizon, eating the earth and soil wherever they set down in a literal act of assimilation and becoming.
"Yaiza" broke my heart wide open and explores how even an act of kindness can be manipulated and injure "outsiders" within the codified walls of a community. In "Catarina", a woman begins a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma and tells the reader about observing his marriage from the outside. It's a brutal look at relationships and explores the boundless capabilities of what it means to love. "The Man I Could Be" rattles the reader with its brutality and exploration of masculinity as a young boy puts on the mantle of the warrior he believes he could be when his father gifts him his Korean war jacket. And in "The Whitest Girl" Peynado examines the intricate hierarchies of girl-society and the unwritten laws of who is chosen to be included and protected within those coveted circles.
Peynado is a stunning writer and her work has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology and won an O. Henry Award, and fans of [a:Carmen Maria Machado|6860265|Carmen Maria Machado|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1461618720p2/6860265.jpg], will love 'The Rock Eaters'.
Many thanks to Edelweiss, the publisher, and the author for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
The book opens with "Thoughts and Prayers", a story that immediately places readers into a familiar and yet foreign setting. In a Florida town, residents pray to the strange, harpy-like angels that perch on their roofs to keep them safe each day...literally offering them "thoughts and prayers". When the town is devastated by a school shooting, Peynado turns the volume all the way up to polarize and mobilize her characters.
Her characters are elemental and in stories like "The Drownings", "The Stones of Sorrow Lake", and "The Rock Eaters", the characters' relationship to land and water becomes intrinsically linked to their being. The children in "The Drownings" spend their time growing up in the water, exploring each others bodies, ingesting chlorine pool water through kisses and to see how long they can hold their breath and beat against the natural and powerful hold of a death by drowning. In a long corrupted rust-belt town the characters in "The Stones of Sorrow Lake" manifest craggy, rock-like tumors upon experiencing their first sorrow. These tumors grow and will eventually need to fall into the waters of Sorrow Lake where they will serve as reminders of past trauma for the inhabitants. In a place where personal tragedy is so visible it is curious to see how the characters care for each other. "The Rock Eaters" is a completely fresh portrayal of diaspora where island inhabitants begin to leave their homeland and travel through the air to places beyond the horizon, eating the earth and soil wherever they set down in a literal act of assimilation and becoming.
"Yaiza" broke my heart wide open and explores how even an act of kindness can be manipulated and injure "outsiders" within the codified walls of a community. In "Catarina", a woman begins a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma and tells the reader about observing his marriage from the outside. It's a brutal look at relationships and explores the boundless capabilities of what it means to love. "The Man I Could Be" rattles the reader with its brutality and exploration of masculinity as a young boy puts on the mantle of the warrior he believes he could be when his father gifts him his Korean war jacket. And in "The Whitest Girl" Peynado examines the intricate hierarchies of girl-society and the unwritten laws of who is chosen to be included and protected within those coveted circles.
Peynado is a stunning writer and her work has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology and won an O. Henry Award, and fans of [a:Carmen Maria Machado|6860265|Carmen Maria Machado|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1461618720p2/6860265.jpg], will love 'The Rock Eaters'.
Many thanks to Edelweiss, the publisher, and the author for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.