Review: Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

 

Here's the description from Goodreads:

Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

This is a short story collection I see myself rereading over and over again.  I feel like I'll discover more with each new reading.  Bender's writing is so poetic and the stories so fantastic, you feel like you've walked into a modern day fairy tale.  My little sister knows my reading tastes, and this book proves it.  I am so happy she lent this to me because otherwise I may never have read it!

Each story is familiar yet completely weird and different.  There's the boy with keys for fingers.  The girl who stops at a fruit stand and walks into something completely different.  A pumpkin head family that has a son with an iron head.  On the surface, each story is about what it seems-a kid with an iron head living with a bunch of pumpkin heads, etc.  But when you think about it, each of these stories also relates so well to our own lives.

I really need to read more short stories, because this collection was phenomenal.  Have you read Aimee Bender?  If not I suggest you do!

Title: Willful Creatures

Author: Aimee Bender

Date of Publication: 2005

Number of Pages:208

Genre: Fiction, short stories

Source: Lent to me by my little sister