Really very fascinating stuff. I thoroughly enjoyed all the meditations on parenting and poverty, and the classically tragic plotlines. Dystopia is not entirely my game, but I enjoyed Escape from the Spiderhead and the Semplica Girl Diaries, all the same. I found the language challenging - at times almost to the point of inscrutability - but I like that in a book. I particularly found it worthwhile in Victory Lap, a story whose pivotal point turns on an ambiguity in the language which the reader can interpret either way. And while we are on the subject - I got a kick out of the parallels between Victory Lap and the eponymous last story, both stories of accidental rescue, although I needed someone else to point it out.

I think Sticks is one of the more head-scratchy of the stories, complete with Saunders’s go-to ironic ending, but to me it was quite elegant. An entire family’s lifetime is told in just over a page of text, a character is constructed and deconstructed, and a world of emotional volatility precisely captured. And the sparsity of its text is self-referentially illustrated in the lawn display at the center of the story. It brings to mind some of the more infamous very-short short stories (“For sale, baby shoes”, and so forth). While I can understand that it’s not the most enjoyable story in this collection, I think it’s worth some consideration.

Like, I suspect, a lot of other readers, I found “My Chivalric Fiasco” hilarious, and I thought “Home” was heartbreaking.

The collection as a whole is definitely worth a read.