HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES - CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

Kate got my parents to buy her this for Christmas, I do not know where she heard about it. Apparently, Machado has written for the New Yorker, but since I usually don’t pay attention to the fiction there, I was unawares. In general, I don’t really like short stories. I like novels and some short stories really slap but overall, they’re not really my thing. They always seem to come off to me as too cutesy and trite or not enough. That being said, I loved these. I only read this because I found out one of the stories in here is a fictional description of Law and Order: SVU episodes, kinda short, one or so paragraphs, TV Guide style write-ups. I started reading them out of my love of SVU, not realizing that Machado’s commitment to verisimilitude required she use the actual episode names as well as the then-current number of seasons (12, but the show is now up to 19) and renders the whole “story” 60+ pages long. That “story”, or collection of recaps or bizarre riff on the canon of a popular TV show, was good enough and represented enough of the total page count of HBAOP that I decided to read them from the beginning. Not unlike the SVU segment the rest of the collection is weird and genre defiant. There are frequent elements of Sci-Fi or fables and fantasy. The writing is likewise strange and wonderful. Once, the book told me, the reader, to look outside because it would be raining and, lo, it was (I do live in Seattle, but still). Besides the SVU thing, the first two stories are my favorite. They both represent the best of total genre freedom Machado is able to achieve and contain some of the hottest book sex I’ve read in a while. I hope she writes a novel. 13 Ribbons.