Foto do autor

Patricia Russo

Autor(a) de Shiny Thing

14+ Works 20 Membros 3 Reviews

Obras de Patricia Russo

Associated Works

The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2015 Edition (2015) — Contribuinte — 73 cópias
Women of darkness (1988) — Contribuinte — 47 cópias
Clockwork Phoenix 5 (2016) — Contribuinte — 34 cópias
Clockwork Phoenix 4 (2013) — Contribuinte — 32 cópias
The Lone Star Stories Reader (2008) — Contribuinte — 23 cópias
The Best of Talebones (2010) — Contribuinte — 8 cópias
Horror Without Victims (2013) — Contribuinte — 4 cópias
Cabinet des Fées 3 (2010) — Contribuinte — 3 cópias
Daily Science Fiction: August 2011 (2011) — Contribuinte — 1 exemplar(es)
Daily Science Fiction: June 2013 (2013) — Contribuinte — 1 exemplar(es)
Daily Science Fiction: May 2014 (2014) — Contribuinte — 1 exemplar(es)
Daily Science Fiction: June 2015 (2015) — Contribuinte — 1 exemplar(es)

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
female

Membros

Resenhas

My review from LJ:
I feel evangelical about Patricia Russo’s Shiny Thing, which would probably cause some folks to look askance south of Blue Street, the rundown city neighborhood where a number of the collection’s stories are set. Folks living south of Blue Street have life hard enough as it is; the last thing they need is some evangelist coming along and testifying to them.

Patricia Russo herself would never evangelize. She just lays her wares out, like Ribbie the peddler in “Grandpa Lost His Toothbrush”:

“Ribbie said, ‘I’m a traveler and a trader, a dealer and a wheeler. I buy and I sell, I barter and I swap. I thought I’d try my luck in your fair town.’ … So the hairy guy, he asks Ribbie what he’s got to sell. So Ribbie, what can he do? He takes off his pack and lays out some of his wares. Mechanical pencils with extra leads. Eyeglasses. Freeze-dried chewing gum. You ever have that? It’s nasty. A busted flashlight. Some plastic bags in pretty good shape. An ink-jet printer cartridge, vacuum-sealed. Buttons. Hand-made fly-swatters. You know. The usual."


Russo’s stories are filled with just this sort of odds and ends. There are boarded-up stores and burnt-out houses, starving dogs and ancient cats. When she brings you a fountain of youth, it’s not a fountain; it’s a patch of dirt between two dumpsters; when a man can resurrect the dead, it’s via a nasty conjoined mini-being who lives on his forearm, tormenting him (or is that his schizophrenia speaking? Doesn’t really matter—it comes to the same thing.)

But don’t go! Don’t turn away! To crib from Leonard Cohen, Russo shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers. There really are heroes in the seaweed, but they’re not the heroes you’re used to. They’re weaker, frailer, older. They’re grumpy old men and iron-haired women, pizza delivery guys and retirees. Confronted with suffering and need, they could just walk away, but they don’t. This is in spite of the fact that Russo’s characters are all basically loners. If they’re living with others, it’s not an entirely (or even mostly) comfortable association. So this means that when they offer love, they’re doing it from a place of emotional poverty, rather than plenty.

They answer a call (literally and metaphorically) to help . . . and then lots of different things happen. Nothing’s certain. Russo’s not writing transactional stories here. Her characters aren’t in it for a reward. They’re simply moved by compassion.

And the objects of their compassion are the creatures or people that, in other stories, would be the monsters. In “Fugly,” a creature crashes through Lenore and Pete’s bathroom window:

It was hairy, rather than furry, and lumpy. Misshapen. Lenore pushed away the word deformed. Limbs, yes, digits, yes, eyes and nose and a mouth, a torso; its genitalia were hidden, but Lenore had an impression of femaleness. For no real reason... perhaps its roundness? The limbs were round, the torso round. A balloon creature, but made of flesh. And old, she thought. Old. Its fur... its hair... was black, the silver-olive skin of its bare limbs unwrinkled, but age radiated from it, like heat.


Lenore can see it’s frightened. Lenore worries it may even be dying. “I’ll help if I can,” she tells it, and it crawls into her lap:

It pressed its head against her stomach, and wrapped its own limbs around her, and they came together perfectly, with a silent jigsaw-puzzle click, as if they were two parts of one whole, as if Lenore had created this being herself, a custom-made stranger, to fit her so neatly and exactly … In her arms, the stranger began to breathe more easily, and soon a low sound came from the center of its chest, something like a purr, something like a coo.


In “Shiny Thing,” it’s a dying man who’s in need of help. He rings Franklin and Lelia’s doorbell. Franklin wants to ignore him, but Lelia buzzes him in:

He looked ill, feverish, the wetness slicking his face more sweat than rain. He was older than [Lelia] had thought, long past middle-age, and the flesh of his round face had sagged off the bone to become loose, bulldog jowls. He trembled as he rested against the banister at the top of the landing, rain drops shuddering from his bright coat, a wet trail like that of a massive snail streaking the steps behind him.


The man has a paper bag full of leaves that must be delivered to Allern Avenue. (Leaves? Yes, green leaves, which are “soft, like old paper, and so green and new [Lelia] feared they’d stain her fingers.”) Lelia is willing to help; Franklin isn’t. In this case, the tale does hew to fairytale tradition, and Franklin ends up regretting his decision.

Lest you get the sense that it’s only women who are compassionate in Russo’s stories, let me introduce you to Austin. In “Redemption,” Austin delivers three pizzas to an unpromising address, where he meets three women suffering from a macabre curse. He’s moved to try to lift the curse. To say it doesn’t go well would be an understatement. He loses everything, is on the street, is beaten up—but he’s as happy in his decision as Lelia was.

Even though Russo’s characters are loners, they do sometimes find their tribe. The narrator in “Hidden” never wanted to have children; she didn’t trust herself to be a successful parent. But when her husband—who buried his own desire for children for her sake—asks her to use her skills to find a missing child, she does, for his sake, and a family is born. In “Turning, or Turning,” Alberico yearns to turn into a “wet” person, like so many of the people around him. That change is denied him, but a different kind of turning opens the door to a different tribe. And, in “Frank, Stephanie, and Jimmy Popcorn,” the titular characters, who have come to the Endless Land to search for hope, recognize in one another’s unsmiling faces a kinship:

Stephanie said, “So we are No-smiles. So what? That doesn’t make us friends.”
“It makes us kin.”
“Only travel-kin.”


But over time, travel-kin can become family-kin:

Frank and Stephanie and Jimmy Popcorn trekked over the Endless Lands together for a long time. Stephanie paid for their food. Frank told jokes. Jimmy Popcorn rubbed their feet when they were too tired to take another step. Helplessly, hopelessly, the way these things happened, they glanced around one day and discovered that they all loved each other.


The last line of “Frank, Stephanie, and Jimmy Popcorn”—which happens also to be the last line of the collection—describes the collection perfectly:

Our world is hard, but there is still beauty in it.


A postscript, because somehow I’ve managed to come to the end of the review without mentioning my favorite story. Do read “The Jaculi.” It reminds you to be thankful for grandmothers of any age or sex.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
FrancescaForrest | outras 2 resenhas | May 12, 2014 |
My review from LJ:
I feel evangelical about Patricia Russo’s Shiny Thing, which would probably cause some folks to look askance south of Blue Street, the rundown city neighborhood where a number of the collection’s stories are set. Folks living south of Blue Street have life hard enough as it is; the last thing they need is some evangelist coming along and testifying to them.

Patricia Russo herself would never evangelize. She just lays her wares out, like Ribbie the peddler in “Grandpa Lost His Toothbrush”:

“Ribbie said, ‘I’m a traveler and a trader, a dealer and a wheeler. I buy and I sell, I barter and I swap. I thought I’d try my luck in your fair town.’ … So the hairy guy, he asks Ribbie what he’s got to sell. So Ribbie, what can he do? He takes off his pack and lays out some of his wares. Mechanical pencils with extra leads. Eyeglasses. Freeze-dried chewing gum. You ever have that? It’s nasty. A busted flashlight. Some plastic bags in pretty good shape. An ink-jet printer cartridge, vacuum-sealed. Buttons. Hand-made fly-swatters. You know. The usual."


Russo’s stories are filled with just this sort of odds and ends. There are boarded-up stores and burnt-out houses, starving dogs and ancient cats. When she brings you a fountain of youth, it’s not a fountain; it’s a patch of dirt between two dumpsters; when a man can resurrect the dead, it’s via a nasty conjoined mini-being who lives on his forearm, tormenting him (or is that his schizophrenia speaking? Doesn’t really matter—it comes to the same thing.)

But don’t go! Don’t turn away! To crib from Leonard Cohen, Russo shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers. There really are heroes in the seaweed, but they’re not the heroes you’re used to. They’re weaker, frailer, older. They’re grumpy old men and iron-haired women, pizza delivery guys and retirees. Confronted with suffering and need, they could just walk away, but they don’t. This is in spite of the fact that Russo’s characters are all basically loners. If they’re living with others, it’s not an entirely (or even mostly) comfortable association. So this means that when they offer love, they’re doing it from a place of emotional poverty, rather than plenty.

They answer a call (literally and metaphorically) to help . . . and then lots of different things happen. Nothing’s certain. Russo’s not writing transactional stories here. Her characters aren’t in it for a reward. They’re simply moved by compassion.

And the objects of their compassion are the creatures or people that, in other stories, would be the monsters. In “Fugly,” a creature crashes through Lenore and Pete’s bathroom window:

It was hairy, rather than furry, and lumpy. Misshapen. Lenore pushed away the word deformed. Limbs, yes, digits, yes, eyes and nose and a mouth, a torso; its genitalia were hidden, but Lenore had an impression of femaleness. For no real reason... perhaps its roundness? The limbs were round, the torso round. A balloon creature, but made of flesh. And old, she thought. Old. Its fur... its hair... was black, the silver-olive skin of its bare limbs unwrinkled, but age radiated from it, like heat.


Lenore can see it’s frightened. Lenore worries it may even be dying. “I’ll help if I can,” she tells it, and it crawls into her lap:

It pressed its head against her stomach, and wrapped its own limbs around her, and they came together perfectly, with a silent jigsaw-puzzle click, as if they were two parts of one whole, as if Lenore had created this being herself, a custom-made stranger, to fit her so neatly and exactly … In her arms, the stranger began to breathe more easily, and soon a low sound came from the center of its chest, something like a purr, something like a coo.


In “Shiny Thing,” it’s a dying man who’s in need of help. He rings Franklin and Lelia’s doorbell. Franklin wants to ignore him, but Lelia buzzes him in:

He looked ill, feverish, the wetness slicking his face more sweat than rain. He was older than [Lelia] had thought, long past middle-age, and the flesh of his round face had sagged off the bone to become loose, bulldog jowls. He trembled as he rested against the banister at the top of the landing, rain drops shuddering from his bright coat, a wet trail like that of a massive snail streaking the steps behind him.


The man has a paper bag full of leaves that must be delivered to Allern Avenue. (Leaves? Yes, green leaves, which are “soft, like old paper, and so green and new [Lelia] feared they’d stain her fingers.”) Lelia is willing to help; Franklin isn’t. In this case, the tale does hew to fairytale tradition, and Franklin ends up regretting his decision.

Lest you get the sense that it’s only women who are compassionate in Russo’s stories, let me introduce you to Austin. In “Redemption,” Austin delivers three pizzas to an unpromising address, where he meets three women suffering from a macabre curse. He’s moved to try to lift the curse. To say it doesn’t go well would be an understatement. He loses everything, is on the street, is beaten up—but he’s as happy in his decision as Lelia was.

Even though Russo’s characters are loners, they do sometimes find their tribe. The narrator in “Hidden” never wanted to have children; she didn’t trust herself to be a successful parent. But when her husband—who buried his own desire for children for her sake—asks her to use her skills to find a missing child, she does, for his sake, and a family is born. In “Turning, or Turning,” Alberico yearns to turn into a “wet” person, like so many of the people around him. That change is denied him, but a different kind of turning opens the door to a different tribe. And, in “Frank, Stephanie, and Jimmy Popcorn,” the titular characters, who have come to the Endless Land to search for hope, recognize in one another’s unsmiling faces a kinship:

Stephanie said, “So we are No-smiles. So what? That doesn’t make us friends.”
“It makes us kin.”
“Only travel-kin.”


But over time, travel-kin can become family-kin:

Frank and Stephanie and Jimmy Popcorn trekked over the Endless Lands together for a long time. Stephanie paid for their food. Frank told jokes. Jimmy Popcorn rubbed their feet when they were too tired to take another step. Helplessly, hopelessly, the way these things happened, they glanced around one day and discovered that they all loved each other.


The last line of “Frank, Stephanie, and Jimmy Popcorn”—which happens also to be the last line of the collection—describes the collection perfectly:

Our world is hard, but there is still beauty in it.


A postscript, because somehow I’ve managed to come to the end of the review without mentioning my favorite story. Do read “The Jaculi.” It reminds you to be thankful for grandmothers of any age or sex.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
FrancescaForrest | outras 2 resenhas | May 12, 2014 |
You owe it to yourself to take a brief trip to Blue Street and The Triangle via the nineteen stories in this book. The writer paints a vivid image of a place where the occupants have learned to rely on no one but themselves in their daily struggle to survive. With a subtle voice she weaves stories that will stay with you long after you have put the book aside.
 
Marcado
RSchiver | outras 2 resenhas | Aug 29, 2012 |

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Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
14
Also by
12
Membros
20
Popularidade
#589,235
Avaliação
½ 3.6
Resenhas
3
ISBNs
1