In each of these 40 stories, family pulls at the characters in different ways. In \u201cMother, False,\u201d it\u2019s in a fantastical way, extra hands growing out of her body after her mother dies and she must take over that role in the household. In \u201cThere Are Places That Will Fill You Up,\u201d a girl leaves the comfort of her father\u2019s home for the dangerous magic of her unknown mother\u2019s world. In \u201cNartaki,\u201d a girl runs from the responsibilities of her family to join a group of dancers led by a woman everyone calls Mother, which is both her making and her downfall. In contrast, there are also stories that are almost painfully real. In \u201cFever,\u201d the reader follows a relationship between a man and woman through some of its important moments. \u201cShabnam Salamat\u201d follows a daughter\u2019s relationship with her family when her father marries a second, younger wife in an attempt to finally have a son. \u201cSaanwalee\u201d sees a girl trying to bleach her skin as she falls for a lighter-skinned boy, and \u201cWhite Ash\u201d follows a couple whose daughter has gone missing. The thing that connects all these stories is Zambrano\u2019s poise with a sentence. Each word is meticulously planned, with short thoughts connecting to create sprawling worlds. Despite the author\u2019s skill with brevity, it\u2019s her longer stories, rather than the two- or three-page snippets, that truly shine. Spending more time with the characters pays off with a sense of realism and empathy that rings true. Sometimes the precision is perhaps a little too precise, giving the stories the feeling of textbook entries, but the good more than outweighs the bad.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In each of these 40 stories, family pulls at the characters in different ways. In \u201cMother, False,\u201d it\u2019s in a fantastical way, extra hands growing out of her body after her mother dies and she must take over that role in the household. In \u201cThere Are Places That Will Fill You Up,\u201d a girl leaves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746"}],"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=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}