{"id":6741,"date":"2026-07-07T10:15:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T10:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6741"},"modified":"2026-07-07T10:15:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T10:15:54","slug":"the-bedtime-emptying-of-our-world-by-joel-hans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6741","title":{"rendered":"The Bedtime Emptying of Our World by Joel Hans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where every story opens a door into the impossible, it also leads back to something profoundly human.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Bedtime Emptying of Our World<\/em> is a cohesive, wildly inventive collection. Each time you think you understand the shape of the book, author Joel Hans pulls the rug out from under you to reveal a strange, beautiful, heartbreaking direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From the opening story, \u201cA Man, His Oblations,\u201d Hans establishes the possibility that rules exist, even in a world governed by impossible transformations. A grieving father casts objects into a mysterious gulf that returns them altered, improved, and sometimes changed beyond recognition. What begins as an imaginative premise quickly evolves into something deeper: a meditation on grief, parenthood, hope, and the unbearable tension between accepting loss and refusing to surrender to it. The story is emotionally devastating, yet never sentimental. It captures the irrational bargains we make with ourselves when love and grief become inseparable.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

That emotional core runs through the entire collection. Hans populates his stories with girls living inside apples, children carried through fairy-tale landscapes, impossible circuses, time-bending crows, transformed animals, moons, deserts, and mythic creatures. Yet beneath every act of wonder lies a recognizably human concern: family, memory, aging, longing, parenthood, mortality, and the desperate desire to preserve what inevitably changes.<\/p>\n

The title story, \u201cThe Bedtime Emptying of Our World,\u201d is one of the finest examples of this balancing act. On the surface, it describes parents attempting to gather the entire universe into their daughter\u2019s bedroom before bedtime. The story is whimsical and playful, but beneath the fantasy lies something achingly familiar: the realization that children are constantly growing away from us, building worlds that eventually become larger than our own. Hans captures the joy and melancholy of parenting with remarkable precision.<\/p>\n

Equally impressive is \u201cThirty-One Functions for a Girl Living Inside an Apple,\u201d which borrows the structure of folklore and fairy-tale scholarship to tell a story that feels both ancient and startlingly modern. It is clever without becoming gimmicky, emotional without becoming overwrought, and ambitious without losing sight of character.<\/p>\n

What impressed me most, however, was the sheer consistency. Collections this imaginative often have a few standout stories surrounded by weaker entries. That is not the case here. Each story introduces a fresh premise, a new mythology, or an unexpected narrative framework. The plots never feel recycled. The imagery never feels repetitive. Most importantly, I never found my attention drifting. Hans continually rewards curiosity, inviting readers into increasingly strange corners of his imagination while grounding each story in genuine emotional stakes.<\/p>\n

Hans\u2019s writing is lyrical without becoming self-indulgent, rich without becoming inaccessible, and strange without ever losing its emotional center. Sentences shimmer with fairy-tale logic and poetic imagery, but they remain purposeful. There is a confidence to the storytelling that allows even the most fantastical concepts to feel believable. The desert setting that appears throughout the collection becomes its own kind of mythology, lending the book a distinct sense of place that separates it from more traditional fantasy, sci-fi, or speculative fiction.<\/p>\n

The Bedtime Emptying of Our World<\/em> is imaginative, intelligent, and remarkably original\u2014a collection filled with wonder. Beneath every magical transformation, impossible creature, and dreamlike landscape is a question about how we love each other, how we lose each other, and how we continue forward anyway.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The post The Bedtime Emptying of Our World by Joel Hans<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where every story opens a door into the impossible, it also leads back to something profoundly human. The Bedtime Emptying of Our World is a cohesive, wildly inventive collection. Each time you think you understand the shape of the book, author Joel Hans pulls the rug out from under you to reveal a strange, beautiful, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}