5. Sonya Taaffe (2018), Forget the Sleepless Shores
Sunday, 30 August 2020 19:03This is a collection of short stories whose author is known in this parish as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay. I hope she won't mind if I proceed to just call her S for the rest of this review, a) to save myself having to keep typing out the code for sovay, and b) to signal that I'm writing about her in a different way here anyway, which bridges both sovay, the DW friend, and Sonya Taaffe, the author.
We've been DW friends for a few years now (probably about four-ish?), and I have been following S's writing career all that time. It is obviously a big passion and a serious commitment for her - she regularly posts to say that she has had an individual short story or poem published, attends readings and cons to present / talk about her work (in pre-COVID times anyway), and of course reported the publication of this book a couple of years ago. I've been a little slow to get round to acquiring and reading it, but not because I had any doubt that it would be good. I'd already read a couple of the individual stories in it anyway which S had shared, and been extremely impressed. I'm just slow, is all.
I've never met S in real life, as she lives in Boston, but she tells her DW readers a lot about herself, and has clearly put a lot of the same self into her stories too. So I had very much the same experience reading this book as I did when reading my friend Andrew Hickey's novel Head of State (LJ / DW) of recognising the person I know through DW in the stories. S's passion for the sea, knowledge of Classical myth and literature, Jewish heritage, and queer identity are all here, combined with a fine-detail observation of urban landscapes and a sense of colour and the best words for conveying it vividly which really struck me in the first of her stories that I read.
I'm not going to write about every single story, because there are twenty-two in the book altogether, but ( here are some notes on my favourites ones and what I liked about them )
In short, a very impressive and enjoyable collection which I highly recommend. S has a real gift for taking established literature, myth and history, combining it with close observation and transforming it into something completely new and unexpected. Here's to her further success as a writer.
sovay. I hope she won't mind if I proceed to just call her S for the rest of this review, a) to save myself having to keep typing out the code for sovay, and b) to signal that I'm writing about her in a different way here anyway, which bridges both sovay, the DW friend, and Sonya Taaffe, the author.We've been DW friends for a few years now (probably about four-ish?), and I have been following S's writing career all that time. It is obviously a big passion and a serious commitment for her - she regularly posts to say that she has had an individual short story or poem published, attends readings and cons to present / talk about her work (in pre-COVID times anyway), and of course reported the publication of this book a couple of years ago. I've been a little slow to get round to acquiring and reading it, but not because I had any doubt that it would be good. I'd already read a couple of the individual stories in it anyway which S had shared, and been extremely impressed. I'm just slow, is all.
I've never met S in real life, as she lives in Boston, but she tells her DW readers a lot about herself, and has clearly put a lot of the same self into her stories too. So I had very much the same experience reading this book as I did when reading my friend Andrew Hickey's novel Head of State (LJ / DW) of recognising the person I know through DW in the stories. S's passion for the sea, knowledge of Classical myth and literature, Jewish heritage, and queer identity are all here, combined with a fine-detail observation of urban landscapes and a sense of colour and the best words for conveying it vividly which really struck me in the first of her stories that I read.
I'm not going to write about every single story, because there are twenty-two in the book altogether, but ( here are some notes on my favourites ones and what I liked about them )
In short, a very impressive and enjoyable collection which I highly recommend. S has a real gift for taking established literature, myth and history, combining it with close observation and transforming it into something completely new and unexpected. Here's to her further success as a writer.
