Imagine how this opening sentence hits after Emma Cline’s boring mopes: “The morning before the school shooting passed like any other, all my neighbors out at dawn performing oblations to the angels on our roofs.” Pow! Brenda Peynado’s world-building is impressive considering the stories’ fantastic tendencies—her effortlessness is almost Philip K. Dickensian with how the reader is forced (and trusted) to understand the environment and the rules before turning a page. Sixteen times! This is where Daddy failed me. Does “effortless” have two meanings?

Even here, though, collected-short-story fatigue set in somewhere past the middle. That’s (mostly) inevitable and likely the reason the format is often kept under three hundred pages, even when beginnings and endings are included. I’m sorry to pick so on Cline but the difference is hard to disregard. It’s not her fault. It’s not Peynado’s either. ⭐⭐⭐⭐