Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness reviewed in the Winnipeg Review :)
So grateful for Sharon Chisvin’s generous review of my new Guernica Editions short story collection Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness in the Winnipeg Free Press ❤️❤️📚 I really appreciate the thoughtfulness and support. thank you so much to Heather Wood and Guernica Editions for everything 🧡🧡🧡📚 and thank you so much to the reviewer
“Each one of these characters [exists] in the course of just a few short pages, making most of the 32 stories in this collection compelling, highly readable and frequently relatable...The fact that many of her stories focus on Jewish identity and history gives the collection an extra gravitas at a time when many Jewish writers and books with Jewish subject matter are being review bombed because of their authorship or content...In the inventive and most impressive story in the collection, Like an Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish, the narrator, Jamie, having just overdosed from drugs, meets up with Anne Frank in heaven...The spectre of the Holocaust reappears in the moving story Able to Pass, in which a young sculptor fashions a golem to go back in time and save her grandmother’s sister. It hovers again in a third story, Proteksiye and Mazel, in which Botha takes readers into the Kovno ghetto, where a young girl named Adaske dreams of escape...Readers definitely should persevere with this collection, as they are certain to find that most of the stories, and most of the vulnerable women at their core, are insightful, engaging and, although not happy in nature, evidence of Botha’s obvious talent.”
Sharon Chisvin, The Winnipeg Free Press
You can read it here:
