Libby Heily

Book source ~ ARC. My review is voluntary and honest.

Reggie is in the 6th grade and has problems with a school bully. But that’s only one of the things she has to deal with. She’s poor and her mom is constantly zoning out. This month’s food is almost gone and Reggie needs her mom to snap out of it, cash her check, and buy some groceries. Except when her mom goes out to shop, she never returns home. As the days pass, Reggie relies heavily on her imaginary friend, Tough Girl. But her situation is deteriorating quickly. Will she survive until her mom returns?

This is a weird read. Not bad weird though, but good weird. Reggie is a fighter, in the sense that she continues on despite adversity. But she’s only, what? 11 or 12. Her mom appears to have some kind of mental illness and is getting worse. Then she just disappears. Gah! Poor Reggie! Things are happening and Reggie doesn’t want to go to foster care, but holy shit. What the hell is going on in this book? The parts with Tough Girl are just as interesting. I can’t elaborate because I want you to read it and see for yourself. What a great read. I recommend this.… (más)

Tough Girl tells the tale of Reggie. Reggie is a young girl facing a bleak existence. In a state of neglect caused by her mother’s fragile mental state she faces a harsh world. She is left to fend for herself and as a desperate attempt to cope her own fantasy life intrudes ever more strongly as she struggles to make her way through unforgiving days. With school a source of further persecution she exists in a narrow world without the skills necessary to find her way out. This is compounded by a swiftly deteriorating physical condition, where lack of access to food and the stress of being on her own take hold.

Libby Heily has done a wonderful job with characterisation in this novel. Reggie’s personality is never overwhelmed by the awfulness of the life she has to contend with, and sympathy is achieved in an unforced manner. The interactions that take place between Reggie and her contemporaries is very authentic and relatable. I was also impressed by the representation of mental health and the reaction of a child of a sufferer. The secretive and evasive way Reggie conducts herself is very real and recognisable to anyone who has been young and felt the confusion of wanting to protect a parent not doing so well but not knowing how to best do that.

The interplay and gradual merging of Reggie’s imaginative and practical worlds is always intriguing, and conveys the disorientation and turmoil of her mindset effectively. The plot is a simple one but amply supports what is best about this story: a potent sense of place and a living snapshot of whole characters. A humane and unusual account of abandonment, youthful psychology and living with poor circumstances.… (más)

Five degrees of short stories.

Three of these stories feature a woman who's trapped in some way. "Thank You For Calling" features a woman who's economically trapped, working for a call center, taking calls from lonely people who need a friendly ear. She wants a regular, day job, so she can see her husband. This is an excellent job of expressing boredom in a character without creating it in the reader. In "The Last Six Miles" a woman is battling to complete a marathon, after being trapped by depression and in a fat body. I really felt like I was in her running shoes, and "got," a little bit, of WHY those crazy runners do that to themselves. In "She Floats," she wakes up, surrounded by water in an aquarium, with twenty minutes of air left, someone observing her, and seemingly, no way out.

The other two stories are vastly different, though they also echo a theme of a character being trapped.

"The Event" is set in a dystopian future, where young males are armed and sent out (don't remember if it's once a month, or once a year) to shoot and kill any elderly people they can find, those who haven't already done society the favor of swallowing a cyanide pill. Raises some interesting questions about peer/societal pressures, and what it can and can't make people do.

In "Fourth Degree Freedom," a post-nuclear-war future, some fetuses carry mutations which turn them into literal monsters, with sharp teeth, claws, and fur. Most prospective parents choose to abort, but for those who don't - what do you do with the monster in the basement? And how will your normal children, if any, interact with their monster sibs?

I really liked all these stories, though "Fourth Degree" was my favorite. At 99 cents for the set, it's a very fair price.
… (más)

If you loved The Matrix and the question of red pill or blue pill, you'll also love Altersensor's Broken. In this futuristic dystopia, everyone is fitted with an altersensor, generally as a child or even an infant, which makes the world brighter, shinier, its people more attractive. When Clyde's becomes broken, he sees the world as it really is: the bacon on his plate is half burnt, half raw. As he travels into the city to get his altersensor repaired, he bumps his head and his altersensor malfunctions in a new way: his bus is clean, well-kept, and filled with attractive people - from the bottom half of his vision down; from the top half it's greasy, dirty, smelly, and the people are filthy, injured, and missing teeth. The world he lives in is badly decaying, walls and buildings literally crumbling away. Clyde meets a man who realizes his condition, and offers him a choice...

People are becoming infected with deep, incurable depression in The Sadness. They lose all interest in life, and then suicide, in groups of eight unrelated strangers, simultaneously jumping off bridges, or stepping in front of a subway train, slitting their wrists, shooting themselves. Eric has become infected with the malaise, and Madison is doing everything in her power to draw him back.

What would you do if alien, Silver Spiders were trapping you in your apartment so they could pierce your skull and steal your memories? Your only ally is a rat, your only power to run away, or to freeze, and turn into a statue.

Ryan, aka Doctor Two, is an unlikely hero. 40-ish, pudgy, lazy, a pill-popper, more than a little weird, paranoid and jealous of Doctor One, who is handsome, popular; even the ship's computer has a crush on the guy. Per The Victory Rule, the two doctors are not permitted to be together at any time in these routine supply ship runs to the Mars colony, lest there be an accident and no one left alive to tend to the injured crew.

This prohibition doesn't keep Doc Two from spying on Doc One and his weird experiments; he knows the guy is up to no good, but nobody believes him.

None of these four stories offer bright, shiny, feel-good endings. They are dark in tone and theme, but thought-provoking and beautifully written, the kind of story that subtly draws you in, and lingers in your mind, because you've become the character, and you're wondering, what would I do if...?… (más)