girls and grown women and set in places as familiar as suburban New Jersey, as exotic as Comic-Con, and as far away as Cameroon. Nkweti’s stories offer a wonderfully immersive experience: English mingles with French mingles with pidgin mingles with American teen slang mingles with comic and anime lingo and many other specialized languages. Deliciously disorienting at times and always energizing, the style calls to mind codeswitching as well as the rich polyvocality of America. This is on full display in “It Takes a Village Some Say,” about a girl adopted by an American and Cameroonian American couple, told from the perspectives first of the parents and then of the girl herself. When she finally tells her side of the story, she explains, “I give good read. Mais je suis rien commes des autres. Nothing like them. Those poor, poor telethon kids you scribble letters to and forcefeed poto-poto rice for ‘just ten cents a day.’ Fly-haloed. Swollen tum-tums begging for your pretax dollars. You give and you give and you give again. #SaveOurKids. #BecauseYouCare. No, I am nothing like them, but I made your heartstrings twang with tabloid tales of my liberation….” Throughout, Nkweti’s mostly female protagonists challenge tradition—whether familial, cultural, or gender expectations—and often prevail. But these aren’t fairy tales, and Nkweti’s characters also face the double bind of being too African or not African enough. “For you are African, and by this culture’s definitions, unsightly,” reflects the lonely girl in “Schoolyard Cannibal,” who feels out of place among her African American classmates, while Jennifer in “Kinks” is accused of not being “African African” by her boyfriend, a “Black blogosphere sensation” and author of Unearth ing Your Inner Ancestor. Boisterous and high-spirited debut stories by a talented new writer.
LAS BIUTY QUEENS Stories
Ojeda, Iván Monalisa Astra House (176 pp.) $21.00 | Jun. 1, 2021 978-1-662-60030-2
A Latinx writer and performer shares scenes from 1990s New York. Ojeda was born in Chile. After graduating from university, he/she (Ojeda identifies as both male and female and uses the pronoun he/she) immigrated to the United States. The stories in this collection are set in his/her new home in New York, and they are peopled by sex workers and drag performers. These stories are written in the first person, and when the narrator has a name, it’s almost always Monalisa. There’s nothing unusual, of course, about an author mining their own life for fiction. That said, these short works feel more like excerpts from a diary than stories with a narrative trajectory. What Ojeda presents, for the most part, is a series of things that happened. “In the Bote” relates the narrator’s experience the first time they are put in prison for prostitution. This account will be instructive for anyone who has never spent time at Rikers Island, and 34
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1 april 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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there are certainly some details that most readers are unlikely to find elsewhere. The Chilean protagonist has been advised to give the police a fake Puerto Rican name because this is less likely to lead to involvement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another Chilean inmate takes this first-timer under his wing and…that’s about it. The narrator’s friends get bail money together, and that’s that. In “Ortiz Funeral Home,” Monalisa goes to a friend’s wake. There’s a bit of drama when an unknown someone snatches a bag of cocaine out of the dead woman’s hands, but Ojeda doesn’t develop this detail—or any other element of the story—and the piece just keeps going until it stops. This formlessness is typical of the works gathered here. There are, however, instances when the writing transcends the recitation of facts. “Biuty Queen” is a monologue by a contestant about to participate in “the most important beauty pageant for transsexuals in all the United States.” Deborah Hilton has won five crowns already, she has paid for her dresses and backup dancers with sex work, and she has zero regrets. “Obviously, it was worth it. The crown looks gorgeous on me.” It’s a pleasure to spend time inside the head of someone so emphatically herself. Ojeda shows readers a world that will be unfamiliar to many.
THE ROCK EATERS
Peynado, Brenda Penguin (288 pp.) $15.99 paper | May 11, 2021 978-0-14-313562-3 Sixteen genre-bending stories as substantial as they are superbly crafted. Melding science fiction, fantasy, fable, and legend with atmospheric prose, these stories touch on a wide range of topics: immigration, race, climate change, the inexorable millennial hustle, influencers, gun culture, and the fraught, electric urgency of friendship between adolescent girls. In “Thoughts and Prayers,” silent, guano-dripping angels preside over a suburban neighborhood, their “pale humanoid faces and downy bird bodies perched beside our chimneys,” each believed to bring blessings or misfortune to the family that resides beneath it. “Yaiza” deftly examines class tensions and the myth of meritocracy against a backdrop of tennis court rivalry between two preteen girls: Yaiza, a “scholarship girl,” and the narrator, whose family has hired Yaiza’s grandmother as their latest housekeeper. In “The Great Escape,” the narrator’s great-aunt, spurred by paranoia brought on by Alzheimer’s and a long-ago forced marriage to the nephew of Rafael Trujillo, locks herself in her apartment with increasingly intricate and impenetrable devices. Once an aspiring artist who was left with no medium to ply but the life and belongings she carefully curated, she now “lost things so diligently it was like a religion,” as she herself is being erased by loss, time, greed, and, finally, disease. “The Kite Maker”—set 12 years after the arrival and widespread massacre of a buglike alien species that
