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Book Reviewed by:For fans of George Saunders and Karen Russell, an "amazing, wildly inventive" collection of stories that straddles the line between the real and the fantastical.
In The Wrong Heaven, anything is possible: bodies can transform, inanimate objects come to life, angels appear and disappear.
Bonnaffons draws us into a delightfully strange universe, in which her conflicted characters seek to solve their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places. The title story's heroine reckons with grief while arguing with loquacious Jesus and Mary lawn ornaments that come to life when she plugs them in. In "Horse," we enter a world in which women transform themselves into animals through a series of medical injections. In "Alternate," a young woman convinces herself that all she needs to revive a stagnant relationship is the perfect poster of the Dalai Lama.
While some of the worlds to which Bonnaffons transports us are more recognizable than others, all of them uncover the mysteries beneath the mundane surfaces of our lives. Enormously funny, boldly inventive, and as provocative as they are deeply affecting, these stories lay bare the heart of our deepest longings.
There are moments when the collection seems to be merely quirky for quirkiness' sake, and some readers may find these eccentricities grating. (The titular story featuring the talking lawn ornaments, for example, is aimless, a mere device for delivering something strange.) When all systems are firing, however, the magical elements in The Wrong Heaven are very effective tonally, providing a touch of sinister menace or even silliness to stories that read like fairy tales for world-weary adults...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In one of The Wrong Heaven's most memorable stories, the narrator feels she is gradually losing her mind when she cannot get the song "Hand in My Pocket" by Alanis Morissette out of her head. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as an "earworm." The word has a multi-strand history: Apparently, in ancient times, dried and ground earwigs were used to treat ear disease, and became known as auricula, which is the Latin name for the outer ear. This practice became misunderstood to mean that earwigs - or earworms as they were also called - crawled into people's ears. Later the definition of earworm shifted to refer to a moth larvae that burrowed into corn. At the same time, the German word for the insect earwig is ohrwurm - ohr ("ear") +...
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I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.
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Aimee Bender, New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Incredibly fun to read but also full of these frank and wise observations that stuck in my head long after.
