Jewel Box

August 7, 2023
Yu (On Fragile Waves) displays her considerable skill as a prose stylist in this collection of 22 speculative shorts. The stories range widely in style and setting, from parables of justice during the latter days of the Assyrian Empire (“The Lion God and the Two Gates”), to a techno-dystopic Orpheus and Eurydice retelling where Orpheus plays the theremin (“Music for the Underworld”). Yu is particularly concerned with the abuse of the marginalized and the blindness of privilege, examining these themes through two groups of aliens in “The Wretched and the Beautiful”; the one-percenter wedding story “Green Glass: A Love Story”; and “The Cat’s Tale,” a clever mash-up of “Puss in Boots,” the Pied Piper, and Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale.” Less successful are her riffs on Hans Christian Andersen: both the footnote-heavy sci-fi story “The Time Invariance of Snow,” a take on “The Snow Queen,” and “Three Variations on the Theme of Imperial Attire,” a smug triple-retelling of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” have inexplicable disdain for their source texts. Even when Yu’s plotting confounds, however, her sentences astonish. (Of street lamps, she writes, “They were surrogate moons for an age when the moon itself was too distant and dim to guide travelers in the night.”) The result is well worth reading for any fan of speculative fiction. Agent: Marcus Hoffman, RHA Literary.

September 15, 2023
Twenty-two speculative stories that range from futuristic SF to fairytale remakes. Each tale in Yu's stellar collection could be boiled down to a startling "what if" premise: What if a magician arrived into a wintry village selling eyeballs made of ice ("Ilse, Who Saw Clearly")? What if a witch was a little too helpful in joining a knight on his quest to slay dragons ("The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight")? What if there were a unicorn in Central Park ("Braid of Days and Wake of Nights")? But even the most imaginative premises would fail to come to life without complexity, style, and heart--and Yu has all three. In the charming opener, the angel Gabriel offers to help a Cairo man complete the hajj, but winds up in Miami instead ("The Pilgrim and the Angel"). Very often, the stories wield sharp social critique in ways that update, or invert, traditional fables or fairy tales. In "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees"--an "Ant and the Grasshopper"-esque story nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards--wasps who make accurate maps on the insides of their paper nests colonize--politically--the bees in a Chinese village. In "The Wretched and the Beautiful," an alien craft descends onto a beach and the resulting crisis is an allegory for global refugeeism. Stories like this could be didactic and obvious, but Yu deftly evades predictability. Best of all, her sentences shine with unexpected images and turns of phrase--a "goat-slender" man looking in a mirror; spectacles for the soul that allow its wearer to walk "long in clarity and loneliness thereafter." While a title like "Jewel Box," especially without a titular story attached, could seem aspirational, Yu's book lives up to it: Each story here is a gem. A trove of fantastical treasures.

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Starred review from October 27, 2023

John W. Campbell Award winner Yu's (The River and the World Remade) writing is utterly descriptive, offering readers multiple worlds of imagining. The book starts with a thoughtful tale about family and duty and proceeds to hit multiple high points in a succession that is bountiful and beguiling. "Music from the Underworld" paints a tragic picture of love and digital enslavement in a future authoritarian state. "The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi" picks up on the theme of technology gone awry but with a positive twist. Several fantasy stories meld traditional themes with modern elements; the heartbreaking "Braid of Days and Wake of Nights" combines unicorns with the fight against cancer. A few stories take sci-fi themes and embellish them beautifully, such as "The Urashima Effect," exploring time dilation and space travel and the "Eve of the Planet of Ys," about global disaster and human resilience. The final story, "Small Monsters," takes the cake for sheer inventiveness, allegory, and pluck. VERDICT An astonishing collection of stories ranging from the merely beautiful to the complex articulation of magic. Run, don't walk, to get a hold of this transformative text.--Henry Bankhead

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