User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
***NOVEMBER 2019 UPDATE*** This delightful book has unseated the presumptive champion to become my annual six-stars-of-five bestestest read of the year!
AND it was a 2019 NBA longlister...AND it's in the 2020 Tournament of Books!
Don't start this read if you're not ready to go there. You know the "there" I mean, that there that Gertrude Stein railed against not being there in Oakland, California, circa 1920. Or today, for all I know or care. The there you're going with Author Parsons is the there that we try hard to deal with each in our separate ways, the there that we hate but need. You're not going alone. You might, in fact, prefer solitude on the trip, but by definition, reading is an accompanied silence. Like a playlist of stuff you can't remember liking when you were twenty but comes up when you enter the year you turned twenty into YouTube's maw.
The whole collection's about the messiness of being alive, the passionlessness of the quotidian, purple cabbage Thai dishes that jumble against red beards, hairy armpits. And you know what, no one wins.
There it is. This mess of words and ideas is what's kept Author Parsons busy the past twelve or so years. It's been a good, solid busy, as you can see if the hard stuff is where your reading needs are right now. It's actually more hard for me to imagine her finding the room inside herself to birth two kids! All this life, all these people, you end up feeling like your entire brain is swelling from their bad breath and farts.
As is my wont, I used the time-honored and very efficient Bryce Method to (re)view the stories as they came over at my blog.
SIDE NOTE I was uberpleased that Author Parsons liked my review!
I *loved* reading your take on every story 🖤
— Kimberly King Parsons (@kkingparsons) August 19, 2019
Rating: really liked it
EXCERPT: I'm usually nervous in cars. Whether I'm driving or riding, I can't seem to forget that I'm in a little shell,hurtling along. I want a death that comes from the inside, something I won't have to watch as it's happening - a clot turned loose in my brain, a glossy organ seizing up and shuddering in secret. Car wrecks are shattered windshields and jutting bones, the listless highway patrol scooping bits of you and not-you off the asphalt, zipping the whole mess into a bag. But when Bo is driving - even though she's always looking at herself in the rearview or swerving around road trash in case it's a bag of kittens - my anxiety, usually a thrum as steady and constant as my heartbeat, is something I can smother, tamp down, and forget about for a while.
ABOUT THIS BOOK: With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.
Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, bitter, and wise. Black Light contains the type of storytelling that resonates somewhere deep, in the well of memory that repudiates nostalgia.
MY THOUGHTS: There are a lot of everyday materials that fluoresce or glow when placed under a black light. A black light gives off highly energetic ultraviolet light. Just as these energetic stories fluoresce and glow as they are being read. And just as a black light shows up things not normally visible to the human eye, these are the things that are focused upon in this collection of short stories.
Don't expect anything cute or heartwarming. The author focuses on the seamier side of life, the bits that happen, but nobody talks about, the bits that are swept under the carpet and glossed over. It is our fears and disappointments that she focuses on, not our dreams, aspirations and achievements.
Some of the stories border on the bizarre, all are slightly strange, but very, very real. This was an interesting read, one that deserves not to be hurried. These stories bear a closer inspection and I will be giving them a second read.
My two favourites in this collection are Fiddlebacks, and Starlite.
#BlackLight #NetGalley
😉🤔😏🙄
THE AUTHOR: Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the short story collection Black Light, forthcoming from Vintage August 13, 2019, and the novel The Boiling River, forthcoming from Knopf in 2020ish. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, New South, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Bookforum, Fanzine, Time Out New York, The Millions, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.
DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Vintage, via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.
For an explanation of my rating system, please refer to my profile page on Goodreads.com or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com
This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon and my webpage https://sandysbookaday.wordpress.com/...
Rating: really liked it
I think I will be a dissenting voice for these stories. I found them to be repetitive in ways that were unpleasant.
So much fatphobia, either from a self-directed perspective or other-directed, but all from people who hate fatness and largeness, equating it with disgusting, unclean, lesser-than. The author may be making a point but who wants to read that over and over? In the first story, a woman is larger than her medical student boyfriend, who lectures her in micro-aggressive ways about her story; she is described as cracking a toilet in a dive bar. In another story two women who clearly have eating disorders refer openly to their female coworkers as cows. In another story a woman describes her family as piggies.
Many of the characters see each other only in the ways they can use them. Yes I know this happens in real life but I didn't enjoy reading about it.
There is a repeating theme of seeing light or jewels inside other bodies, an interesting idea once but it's overused by showing up repeatedly.
I know there's a trend in MFA programs for women to grab hold of unpleasantness as if it is the same as being more feminist. I just don't enjoy it much, and the characters in these stories don't either - they are miserable, living in squalor or addiction, and self-destructing.
Rating: really liked it
I read this book for Lambda Literary, where my full review can be found.
Caustic and biting, Kimberly King Parsons’ debut collection
Black Light takes an unflinching look at the manifold ways girls and young women adroitly navigate a culture determined to demean them. Across twelve succinct stories the collection fully renders the sardonic voices of teens and twentysomethings fed up with stultifying suburbs and patronizing men. The heroines frenetically veer between bravado and insecurity; they brazenly rebel against authority, privately worry about their weight, and seek solace in liquor, pills, and sex. Teasing out the differences between youth and experience, Parsons brings to life the thrills and hardships of coming of age and adjusting to adulthood in America.
Rating: really liked it
National Book Award Longlist 2019. A black light makes visible that which is invisible in natural light. What is more, it causes facial features to look ugly—even grotesque. Parsons focuses her black light on the poor and marginalized in these dozen short stories. Their lives are messy. They may be addicted. They may lie and cheat. There is a loneliness and emptiness in these teenage/twenty-something characters that matches the semi-rural Texas where these stories take place.
Parsons' raw, fierce eloquence gives voice to the fears and disappointments of these young adults. Recommend.
Rating: really liked it
Is Friday Night Lights meets Ottessa Moshfegh a thing? Because this collection is kind of like that: unafraid of being dark or weird or gross, and set within the wandering, vacant emptiness of Texas, or anyplace far enough away for you to feel like there's no one else around. These are my favorite kinds of stories, with sharp, surprising sentences and characters full of wanting and loneliness, resourcefulness and humor.
Rating: really liked it
Like if a sucker punch were a pleasant surprise somehow. "Foxes" was particularly vicious (guitar shred), but I didn't want any of these stories to end, which is quite a thing to say about a debut collection. Or any collection.
Rating: really liked it
This short story collection was an interesting mix of the dark and gritty with the mundane. These stories center around the lives of the poor and the marginalized. The collection overall was a bit uneven with some stories not as strong as the others. 3.5⭐️
Rating: really liked it
This hyper-realistic short story collection is dark and depressing and with prose not always sharp enough to work for me. The stories are mostly about people in the middle of bad decisions; not necessarily life-threatening bad decisions but rather smaller, mundane ones. Often these decisions involve neglect, neglect of their own bodies, their living environment, or most tragically their children. In subject matter it reminded me of Lidia Yuknavitch's writing (who makes an appearance in the acknowledgements) but writing wise it could not reach her brilliance. I did not love the way Parsons wrote about weight and sadly too many of her protagonists were unkind about either their own bodies or the bodies of others.
I received an arc of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Tournament of Books LonglistNew to Me in 2020Parsons short story collection
Black Light reads like a forensic examination exposing the grit the grime and all the pieces of ourselves we leave behind in this life. Set mainly in rural Texas and centered on the experiences of women, these are mournable stories. You have daughters abandoned by their fathers, children unsure of which version of their mother awaits them at home, girls rejected by their lovers and women whose lives are directed by their own self loathing. This collection cracked me open and left me raw. One of my Goodreads friends Richard Derus said in his review - "Don't start this read if you're not ready to go there." Sage words of advice for
Black Light is a heavy load to bear that requires the reader to spend time in those uncomfortable spaces we typically try to avoid.
Rating: really liked it
This book is the best. A fever dream with grip. No one writes a sentence like Kimberly King Parsons.
Rating: really liked it
A debut that entertains, stuns, and dazzles at every risk-taking turn. This is short story as art and it's mind-boggling that the two best stories, Glow Hunter (a sensory trip) and Starlite (a seedy hotel masterpiece), were not published before this book's release, making your purchase of this collection mandatory. Parsons is a force and her perfect blend of humor, longing, propulsive style, and humid southern atmospherics makes Black Light one of the best books of the year. I mean, holy shit, people.
Rating: really liked it
This collection doesn't shy away from the grotesque and beautiful. Parsons' characters are entirely relatable. Sad, bored, difficult, destructive, endearing and often hilarious. These stories have some of the best opening and closing sentences I've ever read (and everything in between is pretty damn good, too).
Rating: really liked it
Weird. Unsettling. Brutal. Blunt. Savage. Off-kilter. Dreamy. Luminous. Vivid. Odd. Effing glorious. I'm obsessed with it. And I found a new favorite author.
(Review to come, I think)
Rating: really liked it
This is a collection of short stories primarily set in a semi-rural working class Texas, where there are quantities of both insects and grime. The characters in these stories are primarily children and young women negotiating lives that are marked by insecurity, whether emotional, parental or financial. Despite this common thread, the stories are varied and very interesting. While I liked Parsons's stories set in this world, the two stories that had the most impact were the two that step outside this environment. The first,
Guts, follows a young woman whose relationship with an almost-doctor gives her the ability to see the diseases and ailments of the people around her. The other,
Into the Fold, concerns a student at an exclusive boarding school who witnesses the ostracism of a new classmate.
Parsons is a writer to watch. Her observations are razor sharp and compassionate. I look forward to reading more by her.
