IndieBookView posted: " But I Digretch by Gretchen Astro Turner Genre: Literary Fiction / Short Stories / Humor ISBN: 9781977255495 Print Length: 168 pages Publisher: Outskirts Press Reviewed by Erica Ball But I Digretch is a collection of cha" Independent Book Review
But I Digretch is a collection of charmingly varied short stories all told in the author's unique, bitingly clever, and humorous voice. They feature people living on the edges and cracks of the world and dive deep into what it's like to be them and live there. Touching on emotion, addiction, family dysfunction, mental illness, horror, violence, LGBTQIA+ experiences, love, and beauty, they are also packed with observations generalizable to what it's like being a thinking and feeling person on this planet.
Told in a playful style with astonishing turns of phrase and plenty of allusions and associations, the author's story is at times like poetry in short story form. Some stories also venture into something closer to play or sketch form. One includes copious notes to relevant academic research. Once in a while, the author even breaks the fourth wall to address the reader in order to provide context for what is about to come. Some of them are continuations of previous ones, others stand alone.
The stories themselves mostly take the form of first-person narratives, where we are brought into the deep mental and emotional inner worlds of the characters/narrators. There are moments of action but they all also feature beautiful long contemplative soliloquies on a touch or smell and the associations it evokes. But all the stories also feature a writing style that is rich and dense—so much so that it tickles the language center of the brain with the way it plays with language ("Jackfrostbitten" is my favorite new word). Such inventiveness effectively creates lasting vivid sensations for the reader.
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