Christopher’s book review of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, an anthology edited by Clifford Garstang, appears in The Collagist.
Here is the opening of the review:
In “Eggs,” the opening story in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, a thirteen-year-old girl in rural Central Africa Republic, when her mother dies, takes her two younger sisters from village to village until they reach the capital. A distant aunt takes in the youngest two, but turns her out; she’s old enough, she is told, to fend for herself. Now, she wears borrowed lipstick and is on her way to a bar to meet a man: “to find a man with the means to live in a solid, concrete house with a tin roof, more than one room, and a latrine that’s not communal.” She has never “made fun” with a man. In this story, we are drawn into the girl’s world and moved by the dramatic action of her circumstance. We are transported.
Christopher X. Shade 