Bliss Montage

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The first two stories had me energized for this collection: Ma gets into speculative very quickly and decisively, like the opening paragraph of the first story that introduces to his the Husband (only name given) of the narrator and the 100 ex-boyfriends who live in a separate wing of the house. The second story, too, is quite a sharp tale of relationship revenge. But I must admit that my steam cooled after those two opening stories. In fact, in one of the longer selections in this book, I actually wondered if I had fuzzed out and had missed the ending of one story and had tromped into a different one. This longish episode also didn't click in with the rest of the story after I had finished it. There are a lot of good ideas at play in Ma's writing (issues of racism, orientalism, toxic masculinity, etc.) and the speculative elements seem pertinent to those ideas, and there are some magnificent moments of writing, but many of these stories simply failed to stick the landing, so to speak. While I wondered if I was unwittingly putting myself in her stories that take on meta-elements and the way other people talk about writing, I found myself a little underwhelmed jsut the same.