REVIEW: AWAYLAND, stories by Ramona Ausubel

Hello, readers!

This week, I all but tore through a highly anticipated read of mine: AWAYLAND, a collection of short stories by Ramona Ausubel.

AWAYLAND, stories by Ramona Ausubel

RATING: ★★★★☆

SIMILAR READS: ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD by Anjali Sachdeva, HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES by Carmen Maria Machado.

There are storms beginning to twist in the warm oceans to the south, and maybe they will whip this way, tearing the houses like paper. The ferry could sink beneath them; poisoned gases could leak into the air at any time. The melted ice caps are washing toward them. They’re both dying- everyone is. The schedule of death is not made public. Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrass.

I have been on a real short stories kick this year, more than I ever really have before. I really love the ability to read a bunch of different narratives packed into one collection, especially as a bit of a palate cleanser between longer, singular books. Most of the collections I’ve read have fit into some very unexpected genres, and AWAYLAND certainly fits that mold: if I had to really nail it down, it would definitely fit the magical realism genre. It has some elements of sci-fi and fantasy, but mainly, it retains a realistic view of the world itself while adding fantastical and supernatural elements. Ausubel writes with a beautifully melancholic, yet wry voice, tackling some darker themes, but adding some dry humor here and there to keep the collection from going over the edge.

Most of the stories in the collection deal with a balance of the tangible and the intangible. “Fresh Water from the Sea” illustrates an older woman who has begun to, literally, disappear: her daughter comes to visit her, knowing that this is a death of sorts, but it is a kind that she, her mother, and various doctors have never seen before. In a way, the connection can be drawn between this “disappearing” and other diseases that settle in later in life, like dementia or cancer–things that rob a person’s sense of self and connectedness to the world.

Motherhood (whether anticipated, realized, or unattained) is another strong theme throughout the collection, and “Departure Lounge” is one of my favorites: a woman set to be a cook on the first ever mission to Mars meets up with a former classmate, Peter, who wants a child. He is gay and she is not looking for romance–but the desire to share this bond drives them to make a pact to have a child together.

The largest overlapping theme in the collection is death–or, more specifically, the ways that we try to preserve ourselves or our memories after death. In “Remedy,” Summer convinces herself that she is dying after bringing her fears to a hack doctor. One day, she comes to the conclusion that she would like to have her lover Kit’s hands surgically swapped with hers so that she may carry a piece with him even in death. Once Kit learns about this plan, he impersonates a surgeon who is willing to perform the surgery, beginning an email correspondence that takes the pair from their home in Nantucket to a foreign country.

One of the more comically written stories, “The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following” is told from the perspective of mummified animals in a museum, cataloguing their disappointment in their afterlife being reduced from the paradise they were promised to, literally, shelf life; a nice break from the mainly melancholy collection, with internal narratives of long-dead mummified cats, voles, and dogs musing about the guests that press their faces up against the glass, their origins in Egypt, the rude awakening that was their tombs being raided, and their reserved hope that one day they will pass through this strange purgatory.

The collection does an amazing job of leading the reader one way and pulling them another in the middle of a story. If you had any predictions of where each tale was going, you may be surprised to find that they’ve nearly led you there only to turn in the last few paragraphs.

AWAYLAND is a collection that does not disappoint, with beautifully lyrical prose and compelling, original concepts. Highly recommend.