Death by a Thousand Cuts by Shashi Bhat

The stories in Death by a Thousand Cuts are devastating, funny, and completely accessible. She makes reading feel easy and then drops a thought bomb on you that makes you realize how intentionally-crafted these stories are.

In Dealbreaker, Asha is trying to find a partner through online dating but having no success. She wonders if she’s being too picky. She wishes she didn’t feel the need for a partner, but “a relationship is the last want she has left. A want carved to so fine a sliver it has turned into a need.” Asha has “vowed” to no longer judge people based on: “choice of hygiene products, use of a too-frequent catchphrase, having a very long beard, not having a beard, not owning a bedframe, owning a matching bedroom set inherited from his parents, disorganized storage of video-game controllers, storage of all kitchen utensils in one uncompartmentalized drawer.”

In the very next story, Death By a Thousand Cuts, the narrator has a perfectly good partner, but she’s just not feeling it. She’s trying. But she might just have a very legitimate reason for feeling off. And it’s not the fact that he has webbed toes. It has more to do with his recessive blue eye gene.

In Chicken and Egg, a woman loses her hair; the one trait she has that she considers beautiful. “To you, a hundred still seems like a lot… And there are now more than a hundred strands of hair on your bedroom carpet, and more coiled in the drain, and more nesting in your hairbrush like strange dark birds.”

In Her Ex Writes a Novel, a woman discovers that she has been written about in her ex’s debut novel. She wonders if she should read it. She refuses to buy it but will get it from the library as soon as it comes out. She sees a preview of the novel on Google Books, and it includes a sex scene with her in it, and another scene where she is saying mean things to him. What is she going to do about this?!

“When a man depicts his girlfriend as angry, why does nobody ask what it was that made her that way?”

Other stories in this collection include: a young woman afraid of getting stuck in the wrong life; a woman whose personality changes after suffering from an oil burn to her face; a woman who is alone during the pandemic because of her autoimmune disease; and a woman who wonders if she’s the asshole in the relationship for not wanting her partner to grab at her whenever he feels like it.

“Sometimes I think the hardest thing about being alive is that we can ever really know ourselves.”

What Remains of Elsie Jane by Chelsea Wakelyn (Dundurn Press)

This is a novel about a woman who is devastated by the loss of her husband to addiction. She’s angry. And she’s a mess. But she still has to function for her children. How does a person do that? Chaotically, and with great difficulty. And by hoping beyond hope that there is some magical way of getting back to him if only she could find a wizard on Craigslist. It’s funny and heartbreaking and inspired by true events.

“Some people are born with more heart than sense.”

“My children have become blurs that squawk and orbit around me making demands, and even though I don’t fully see them anymore, I respond as though I do. Still, I have the sneaking suspicion that they’re the only things tethering me to the Earth.”

“My dad was the person I could always call if I was feeling unhinged, the one person in my life that I could be a complete asshole around and he would just love me. If my dad was still alive, I would call him right now, and he would say, Babe, it’s just a plate; don’t be so hard on yourself. He would read me a passage from The Four Agreements, he would take me out to lunch at Ho Tong for the Szechuan shrimp special, and then we would go for a walk to the lighthouse at Ogden Point and he’d tell the same stories he always told me on our walks there. How he’d watched a fisherman get an octopus stuck to his face when he was seven. How he’d sneak under the docks and smoke cigarettes as a teenager. How he’d proposed to my mother there, at the lighthouse and how her hair was black and glossy in the moonlight. He would tease me about smashing things, chuckle at my temper, call it passion and not insanity. He would compare me to my mother whom he never stopped loving, even after she dumped him for the crime of getting depressed and lying on a foam mattress in his home office for two years.”

Adrift by Lisa Brideau (sourcebooks)

Adrift was a page-tuner for me. I wanted to know all the answers as much as the main character. Ess wakes up on a boat off the coast of British Columbia without any memory of who she is and why she is there. But there is a note: “Start over. Don’t make yourself known. Don’t look back.” Understandably, she wants to know who left her this note and what the story is behind it. But as she travels around on her boat searching for clues, she meets new people who she starts to care about. Does she still want to risk everything to find out who she really is, or continue to build this new life for herself?

As Ess is grappling with her situation and keeping her amnesia a secret from her new acquaintances, more amnesiacs are being discovered floating around on boats. The police are asked to find them and detain them, so they can try to figure our what is going on. In addition, the climate crisis is in full swing – water levels are high and dangerous storms are on the rise. A lot of the action takes place in and around the water, contributing to the moody, suspenseful atmosphere of the novel. There’s also a strong sense of the fear and isolation one might feel as an amnesiac who, not only knows no one, but is also always looking over her shoulder for someone who might know her. I’m looking forward to Brideau’s next book!

What have you been reading from the library lately?

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