Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean Review

This week I read Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean: Stories of Imagination and Daring, a collection of short stories edited by Kristy Murray, Payal Dhar, and Anita Roy.  I hadn't heard of this until I got it as a gift for my birthday.

This collection was a response to a wave of violence against women in India and Australia in 2012.  Contributors were asked to re-imagine the world and push the boundaries of what girls were allowed to do.  Then as an added bonus, the contributors were paired up, one writer from India, one writer from Australia. Some of them just bounced ideas off each other, traded stories, then went and wrote their own, while other teams collaborated on single stories.The result is a mix, a nice variety of dystopias, retold myths, sci-fi, and creepy fantasy.

These stories are all very short (the longest is 18 pages, and that one is a graphic story).  It's a length I appreciate both as a reader and a writer.  You can't get too much in there, you can't fit too many levels or story threads, but you can go into detail and get an emotional punch on one set piece, one idea.  That said, some of the stories hit the mark better than others. 

"Cat Calls" by Margo Lanagan, is wonderful.  It made me cry.  And it was positioned perfectly as the first story in the collection.  A girl gets cat called by the same group of men everyday on her way to and from school.  In this world, there exists a technology that retracts the last 30 seconds or so, sucking words back into the mouth of whoever said them and sucking the words from the brain of whoever heard them.  It would be great for this cat calling situation, but this piece of technology isn't for poor girls and the main character can't have one.  Instead, her friends stand up for her, shouting the words back at the men.  The situation is real and relatable.  Lanagan builds up the friendships, the emotion, and the fear, so at the climax is an honestly earned triumph.  And I love, love, love that there's this piece of sci-fi technology, but it has no bearing on the story except that it's not there.  It never appears.  That's so cool on a craft level, and also says a lot about the socioeconomics of feminism. 

"What a Stone Can't Feel" by Penni Russon was another stand out story.  Vega's best friend Bonnie is dying and Vega has to deal with the loss of her friend and the fact that her super power can't save her: she can slip inside inanimate objects.  There's a second plot where a girl with the power of flight finds out Vega has a super power and tries to befriend her.  Russon does a fantastic job making the friendships believable through chatty dialogue and games about what object would you use to record a memory and other abstractions.  Almost all the dialogue is light, the more somber moments left to the white space between sections.  She packs a lot into the word limit like this, showing just snip-its before cutting away, each section short, and still saying a lot in the things that go unsaid.

"Memory Lace" by Payal Dhar was also excellent.  In it, a slave is bought for a rich woman's oldest daughter, who teaches the slave to read and make lace, how to live a free life and replace the memory lace the rich woman bought with something they created.  It's really cool commentary on expectations about gender, but it's hard to get into it without ruining it.  Go read it and come back and we'll talk.

***

Next week: Ten Thousand Skies Above You, the sequel to A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray