Review of Elitsa Dermendzhiyska, “Hope is the Thing With Circuits and Steel,” Flash Fiction Online 146 (November 2025): 44-47 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
I felt like there was something lurking at the edge of this story that was really quite fascinating and worthy, but for some reason, I never quite grasped it. Partly it was that I was never quite sure who the “we” of the narrators were, or what their relationship was to the grandmothers; part of it was that I wasn’t sure if the grandmothers’ continued exhortation to “just google it” was sincere or sarcastic — a sad commentary on how what used to be one of the best parts of the internet has become polluted by its AI-generated results. Whatever the reason(s), sadly this story just wasn’t quite the one for me.
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